A week or two ago Tygodnik Powszechny described how Polish school leaving exams are marked. The example was given of a pupil who wrote that Adam Mickiewicz in one of his plays described the fate of Poles sent to Siberia during World War Two. Rather than scoring zero (Mickiewicz was a nineteenth century writer), the pupil was given a passing mark. After all, Poles did go to Siberia during the war so there’s quite a lot of truth in the glaringly inaccurate statement.

Recently I had the opportunity to cast an eye over the mock finals in English and I can confirm that they have screwed up their education system with the zeal of the recently converted. A typical assignment might be to write a letter containing four pieces of information. For transmitting the four pieces of information there are four marks. For writing correct English there is one mark. It’s the communicative method, you see: less of that stuffy old grammar. The trouble is that English is a terribly easy language to communicate in (I know – trust an educationalist to turn a strength into a weakness). Duke out a few stuttering syllables and you’re away. “Arrive tomorrow night” is perfectly clear English – even acceptable if you’re still into writing telegrams.

Okay, you could argue over how marks should be divided between communication and correctness but surely even the most dogmatic educationalist would clap a hand to her head at the failsafe mechanism: the teachers marking the exams are expected to mark every incorrect word. If the proportion of incorrect words exceeds 25% the pupil fails, regardless of the amount of information transmitted. This of course means that teachers are supposed to count every single word written by their dozens of pupils…

“I will see you before you meeting him.” How many words are wrong there? One word – “meeting”? or did the pupil mean to write “I will see you before your meeting with him”? If the latter, then “you” is wrong” and “with” is wrong (since it is missing). That’s two words out of eight – enough to fail outright – or is it out of nine? God forbid the pupil write: “I will see you before you’re meet him.”