The Printer That Cannot Print the Dot: Grammar Section Under Fault
Your school's computer room has one printer and a font set that cannot produce the dot under t used in Hmar orthography. The grammar section of the half-yearly paper - 15 marks, ten one-mark items and one 5-mark item - was typed there. Checking the proof, you find every dotted letter has printed plain. In item 4 the intended word and the printed word are two different words, and the item becomes unanswerable as it stands. In item 7 the loss changes nothing. Twenty minutes before the bell, 42 candidates are seated.
In the answer scripts, candidates write the ergative marker after a noun in three ways: an apostrophe form, a full -in form, and a plain -n or vowel-only form. The prescribed grammar gives one form in its paradigm table but says nothing about the others, and two of your colleagues write different forms on the blackboard.
1. What do you do in the twenty minutes before the bell?
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Do not pretend the paper is sound. Two defensible options remain. (a) Go to each room and read the affected items aloud, telling candidates that the plain letters in items 4 and 7 stand for the dotted ones. (b) Cancel items 4 and 7 and give every candidate the mark. What you must not do is stay silent and then penalise answers written to what was actually printed - that is marking children on a printer fault. Option (a) is better when only a few items are affected and the invigilator will read identical wording in both rooms; option (b) is better once four or five items are involved, because a long dictation turns into a comprehension test of its own. Whichever you choose, write down what you did and why before you open a single script.
2. Set a marking rule for the three ergative spellings and say how you would announce it.
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Take the form printed in the prescribed grammar's paradigm table as the correct one, and nothing else. The other two spellings lose a mark only in the item that explicitly asks for that form - never in the essay or the letter, where the candidate is being tested on composition, not paradigm recall. Announce it at the start of the next class and write it on the board, with the three spellings side by side. The reasoning: all three forms circulate in the school and two colleagues use different ones, so a candidate cannot be asked to guess whose pen is marking; but a grammar section that accepts every variant tests nothing at all. If the other forms should be taught as acceptable variants, that is a departmental decision, not something to spring on 42 scripts.
3. How do you handle item 4 specifically, once the scripts are in?
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Void item 4 and award its mark to everyone - unless the printed word also yields a possible sentence and you can defend that second reading from the grammar, in which case accept both. Voiding is the cleaner course: an item whose answer turns on a letter the paper could not print is not a test of grammar. Note the decision in the mark record so moderation does not read it as careless inflation, and tell the class plainly what happened and why. The same fault in a board paper would go to the subject committee; in a school paper you are the committee, and the standard is identical - every item must be answerable from what the candidate can actually see in front of them.