I teach a science course at a PUG. 20% of my students will not even attempt to answer short answer questions on exams. I don't believe they know how to write.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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what is PUG?
Primarily UnderGraduate. We have some masters and doctoral programs but no medical or law school and no animal research. It's larger and more comprehensive than a SLAC - Small Liberal Arts College. The next step up is either a comprehensive or research university depending on your country.
As someone who arrogantly assumes that I'd be in the 5% that had a "detailed, literal understanding of the first paragraphs of Bleak House" since I achieved a 36 on my Reading ACT many years ago (and yes, I feel like a loser even writing that), I'll give a tiny defense of at least some of these participants and their results.
The study says that:
Students read each sentence out loud and then interpreted the meaning in their own words—a process Ericsson and Simon (220) called the “think-aloud” or “talk-aloud” method.
I feel like that, in combination with the potential stress of the situation, might lead to really stupid sounding answers, like some of those quoted in the article. I personally tested myself using the "mud" example, and while I think I gave a passable initial answer, a verbal answer that accurately matches and translates the original text on a sentence-by-sentence basis is fairly difficult to construct verbally for me, at least within the first pass. That job of translating the text into modern English is difficult, and is a synthesis of information that requires far more cognitive reasoning than just understanding the text. Give me a pen and paper, and I think I could do a far, far better job, and I would assume the same of a lot of the participants.
Additionally, many of the words and phrases in those samples are very archaic. Participants were allowed to search up definitions, which would definitely help to clarify those archaic terms, but again, I'll note that this seems like a stressful test, and participants may feel like they're being negatively judged for even looking up terms like that. One of the examples highlighted by the article could even be interpreted as showing exactly that:
And I don’t know exactly what “Lord Chancellor” is—some a person of authority, so that’s probably what I would go with. “Sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall,” which would be like a maybe like a hotel or something so [Ten-second pause. The student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily.] O.K., so “Michaelmas Term is the first academic term of the year,” so, Lincoln’s Inn Hall is probably not a hotel [Laughs].
[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers, I’m just gonna skip that.]
The article uncharitably attributes her behavior to "the cognitive load of reading these archaic terms and complex sentences," but I don't know, that just seems like plain test-related stress to me.
many of the words and phrases in those samples are veryarchaic
Some even come with scientific baggage from that era.
The dinosaur, in particular -- during that era, it was believed that most of the great sauropods were too large to exist unencumbered upon land; that they had to be partially or fully aquatic in order for buoyancy to permit them to actually stand on their legs. Plus, most ambulatory references were made to modern lizards and reptiles, the majority of whom walk with legs out to the side instead of directly underneath the body like most mammalian quadrupeds. So the characterization of the dinosaur’s shambling gait was a mischaracterization that arose from assumptions and insufficient data.
Dickens is not difficult and none of those passages need translation. It's just plain modern English
I mean, the study itself seems to disagree with that sentiment:
A principal concern for us was to test whether the subjects had reached a level of “proficient-prose literacy,” which is defined by the U. S. Department of Education as the capability of “reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences” (National Center 3). According to ACT, Inc., this level of literacy translates to a 33–36 score on the Reading Comprehension section of the ACT (Reading). Literary prose can be even more difficult to comprehend because it requires the ability to interpret unfamiliar diction [End Page 2] and figures of speech. Dickens’ novel worked we [sic] as an example of literary prose because his writing contains frequent complex sentences and language that often moves from the literal to the figurative. In Bleak House, Dickens also mixes specific, contemporary references (from the book’s first publication in 1852–3) to his 1820s setting.
I get it, I read that too. Maybe my opinion shouldn't count for much.
Anxiety is a good explanation for what's happening here, yeah. There a social pressure of what is essentially an oral exam, and even if it's basically an open book test there's a test taker right there judging them.
That still implies something kind of bad? Not that they are illiterate, but they are so socially dysfunctional that it makes them illiterate.
Relatable.
I think it's fair to say that them handing this poorly isn't a good sign when it comes to their ability to handle stress (and their social acumen?), but I do think that begs the question: how correlated is their inability to handle a high stress situation here with typical tasks you'd use English proficiency for, or things we'd normally associate with English proficiency?
"In real time, verbally translate an archaic 19th century novel you haven't previous read while under high stress" isn't a situation I think a lot of English majors or scholars find themselves in very often — the closest analogues I can think of would be other specific tests or maybe something like a student asking them a question in a literature course where they're the professor. The vast majority of the time, even on most tests, people can take their time reading, write down notes or make annotations, and re-read the passage as necessary, without needing to verbally dictate their logic.
archaic 19th century
I really can't understand this sentiment. That is modern English
First off, the linked article uses the term "archaic" first to describe the text, which is where I'm taking it from. Regardless, I don't think "archaic" is an unfitting term here — Bleak House was written 171 years ago, with a setting even further back than that. It has a particular written style that is distinctly different from typical, modern English, and it uses now uncommon terms that most modern English speakers (outside of maybe those from the UK?) won't recognize. Mind you, I'm not saying it violates grammatical rules or uses something like Middle English, but at least some of what makes it a challenging read is how old it is.
For example, did you understand what "Michaelmas Term" was without looking it up or having it defined in the article?
I'm sorry, my tone was off somewhere. I was not criticizing you at all, but rather the source material. It just surprised me that they characterized it that way.
I do apologize for the confusion.
No worries, I feel like it's hard to convey tone on the internet. I often personally find it challenging not to come off as confrontational, no matter what my actual intent is.
Reflecting on it a little further, I also think my inconsistent use of "modern" in the prior posts as sometimes a shorthand for both "contemporary" and also "plainly understood" wasn't doing me any favors in conveying my argument.
Right, understood. I'm saying that's it's Modern English as opposed to, say, Middle English. I can (mostly) read Chaucer, for example, but I still have to look stuff up. To me, that's archaic. I cannot read Old English at all. And difficult, to me, would be, say, James Joyce (over my head, honestly), or Thomas Pynchon (readable, but requires a lot of thought), or say Foucault's Pendulum (Eco is so much more erudite than I am).
Edit: punctuation, ironically
Original Text:
As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
Subject:
[Pause.] [Laughs.] So it’s like, um, [Pause.] the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no . . . [Pause.] so everything’s been like kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he’s says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill.
The subject cannot make the leap to figurative language.
How do people even get like this? Holy shit.
Original Text:
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog.
Subject:
Describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great whiskers?
Facilitator:
[Laughs.]
Subject:
A cat?
What the actual fuck.
I mean, the snippet you posted out of context took me a second read, but in context it makes perfect sense. It’s so goddamn muddy it defies understanding. Not unlike these undergraduate’s brains, apparently.
It's just purple prose and metaphor, it takes a little translation but it's not that hard!
What's the world like for these people? If I tell them "this will just take a second" do they get surprised when it takes more than literally one second?
Considering the number of people I say that to and then have them count "One!" and then stare at me with a blank expression,
Yeah probably.
About the only thing I am unsure about is how the waddling dinosaur contributes to the gloomy atmosphere, aside from the physical threat of being trampled underfoot that it would pose.
I guess a modern turn of phrase would be something like, “I almost expected to see…”, in that the conditions were so bad that it wouldn’t be above a sauropod to be present.
Plus, there are also historical interpretations to consider, because when this passage was penned, large dinosaurs were also considered to be mostly aquatic due to their sheer size (water bouyancy was seen as an aid to allow them to stand) and not particularly graceful on land. So “waddling” is indeed a period-appropriate view of how such a sauropod would walk, and not just artistic license by the author.
My take on this is that the "as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth" section is key for the rest of it. All of this is obviously metaphor, but the metaphor Dickens seems to be going with is that "it's so muddy out there, that it's just like prehistoric earth just after land started becoming visible (waters receding and making land visible), and to imagine yourself there walking along and seeing a huge fucking dinosaur basically swimming up the street (in the wet mud) and that 'would not be wonderful to meet' that dinosaur because obviously that's fucking terrifying and it might eat you."
All of the metaphor references are pointing to "muddy as fuck out there and really slippery, and so much so that there might as well be dinosaurs/lizards swimming down the street and that's just miserable".
it's just like prehistoric earth just after land started becoming visible (waters receding and making land visible),
Ironically, it’s more of a Christian source than a scientific one. Once we had any sort of a clear idea of what happened that far back, it’s the land that acquired lakes and oceans by a million years of constant rain as the earth cooled enough for vapour in the atmosphere to precipitate out, whereas the story of Genesis had the waters first, then god creating land by drawing the waters back.
In this case, the dinosaur is just an inadvertent hitchhiker.
Yep - that tracks. Your take is a bit more precise. I think the important part is not to be too hung up on the science of that age and their exact interpretation of how the earth came about, but more just focusing on the general “muddy like (probably) just after the earth was formed and land first came into existence.”
Also a comparison to the Lord Chancellor - an incredibly significant figure of an old institution not fit for modern times.
I hated the gatekeeping and “wash-em-out” attitudes of MA and PhD English programs so much, but maybe now after ChatGPT and a couple years of hybrid learning it’ll serve its purpose more fairly.
Back in the early 1980s, one of my friends was taking a high school English class where they had to read Bleak House. He was not much of a reader, and there was no way he was going to read 1100 pages.
I asked him questions about the book, the basic plot structure and the characters, then I wrote an essay for him including the kind of mistakes that I thought he would make.
He got about the mark that he was expecting, and paid me 20 bucks or something.
hah , i did some girls college homework paper in like 20 minutes the other day then put it in AI and told it to rewrite it as a C student paper so she wouldn't get in trouble. lol