Two Readings, One Shared Motif
A teacher pairs two short prose passages for a reading MCQ. Passage 1 (a 20th-century Latin American short story) describes a character who repeatedly returns to a locked room and finally opens it to find it empty. Passage 2 (a Golden Age poem) describes a traveler who reaches a destination only to find ruins. The teacher wants an item asking students to compare the treatment of 'arrival.' Draft options: A: 'both texts celebrate the rewards of perseverance.' B: 'both texts undercut the expectation that arrival brings fulfillment.' C: 'both texts blame the protagonist for poor planning.' D: 'both texts present arrival as a literal, not symbolic, event.' A colleague objects that B is 'too interpretive' for multiple choice.
1. Is option B answerable from the passages alone, or does it require outside knowledge? Defend or refute the colleague's objection.
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B is answerable from the texts: the empty room and the ruins are both concrete images that invert the expected payoff of arrival. The item asks students to synthesize a shared implication, which is a legitimate reading skill, not outside knowledge. The colleague's objection conflates 'interpretive' with 'unsupported.' B is supported by textual evidence in both passages. A is contradicted (no reward). C imports blame not present in either text. D is contradicted because both endings are clearly symbolic. The item is sound as long as the text evidence is unambiguous, which it is.
2. What would make this item unfair, and how would you revise to prevent it?
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It becomes unfair if one passage's ending is ambiguous enough that a reasonable reader could defend A. The fix is not to soften B but to verify that each passage contains an explicit textual signal of inversion (the word 'vacío' or 'ruinas' functioning as the reveal). If Passage 1 merely implies emptiness, replace it with a passage whose ending is explicit. Fairness here means every distractor is refutable by a specific line, not that the correct answer is easy.