Critics decry latest edits in N.Y. English exam
By The Associated Press
01.09.03
ALBANY, N.Y. — The state English exam students must pass to graduate contained errors and excerpts that deleted some potentially offensive references two months after the state Education Department vowed to stop politically correct editing.
The Education Department, however, denied yesterday that any answers in last August's Board of Regents English exam were wrong or edited for sensitivity and said no student's grade was jeopardized. A department spokesman, though, acknowledged the test misidentified a narrator in a passage and trimmed one paragraph in violation of its new policy.
A critic of standardized testing who prompted the state's new policy last year after test questions were sanitized of reference to race, sex, religion and other sensitive issues however insists the state has done it again, The New York Times reported in yesterday's editions.
Jeanne Heifetz, a parent of a New York City senior, said that the August English exam also altered a passage from Franz Kafka and sanitized another by Aldous Huxley, while misidentifying a narrator and providing three answers to a single question.
She said the passage by Kafka changes his words and removes the middle of a paragraph without ellipses that deleted mentions of God and suicide. She said a passage by Huxley deletes paragraphs on how unpunctual "the Oriental" is, according to the Times.
On the test, a passage from a PBS documentary on the influenza epidemic of 1918, which is read aloud by a proctor, is edited to make it appear that comes from one speaker rather than several historians, survivors and experts. That's when David McCullough is identified as the narrator of the piece narrated by Linda Hunt and critics claim there were three correct answers.
State Education Department spokesman Alan Ray agrees the narrator was misidentified — McCullough was the host of the PBS series — and says a Kafka paragraph shouldn't have been cut under the new policy. But no question was edited for perceived sensitivity and no question was wrong and no student was failed because of the passages, Ray said.
"Teachers are vigilant and no one at the time complained," Ray said yesterday. "Almost all the kids got it right. It wasn't a confusing question."
Sometimes teachers do complain, he said, and those cases are reviewed carefully.
"We've made changes, and there were a number of them before, and we made all the changes that were necessary," Ray said.
As for the Huxley passage, the references to "the Oriental" weren't cut out of political correctness. Instead, the final two summarizing paragraphs were used from the six-paragraph passage in an acceptable editing practice under the policy, Ray said.
"Nothing was deleted for reasons of sensitivity," he said.
Last June, a day after the state was criticized for the politically correct editing of literary passages in tests, Education Commissioner Richard Mills said exams would no longer be changed to delete potentially offensive words and phrases.
The decision was prompted after educators and civil rights watchdogs called the practice "censoring" and "foolish and intellectually dishonest."
Test writers — led by committees of teachers — excised references to race, religion, sexuality and other sensitive topics from literary passages used in the Regents test. In one example, test writers substituted the word "heck" for "hell" in a quotation in Frank Conroy's memoir, Stop-Time.
The edits were made under the state's former "sensitivity guidelines" on age, gender, race and ethnicity, religion, disability, socioeconomic status, sex and other subjects.