Rejected or Refused: When a Distractor Is Half Right
You are checking a 20-item vocabulary worksheet with 30 students. Item 7 reads: 'After a two-hour debate, the committee ______ the proposal on the grounds that it was too costly.' Options: refused / rejected / denied / declined. Your key says 'rejected', but 14 students chose 'refused'. Item 12 asks for a one-word substitution for 'one who speaks many languages'; options are polyglot, linguist, bilingual, translator. Your key says 'polyglot', and a student argues that the dictionary defines 'linguist' as 'a person skilled in languages'. Item 15 asks the meaning of the idiom 'bite the bullet'; three students choose 'to suffer a wound'. The worksheet is being used as a unit test, so the marks count. You have one period to decide the key before the papers go to the coordinator.
1. Rule on 'refused': should it earn the mark? Justify using transitivity, collocation and the phrase 'on the grounds that'.
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No mark, but record the item as flawed.
- Grammar alone does not decide it. Refuse is transitive, so 'refused the proposal' is well-formed. The choice is about meaning and collocation, not about whether a preposition is missing.
- Collocation decides it. Committees reject proposals, amendments and applications; individuals more often refuse an offer, an invitation or a request. 'The committee rejected the proposal' is the standard pairing.
- 'On the grounds that' points to formal rejection after consideration. The phrase reports reasons, which fits a body deciding on a proposal, not a person declining to do something.
- Refused is a near-miss, not a howler. It is semantically close and grammatically sound, so 14 out of 30 choosing it is evidence about the item's design, not about 14 careless students.
Keep the key for this test, since marks must be consistent. Then replace the item: either remove refused or add a context that makes rejection unambiguous, such as 'the committee voted to ______ the proposal'.
2. Rule on 'linguist' versus 'polyglot', and state what you would tell the student about one-word substitution items in general.
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'Linguist' does not earn the mark, but the student's objection is legitimate.
- Polyglot means a person who speaks many languages. That is exactly the defining phrase in the question.
- Linguist has two common senses: a person who studies language as a system, and, more loosely, a person good at languages. The first sense does not require many languages at all; a linguist may speak one.
- The student's dictionary is not wrong; it is not precise enough for a single-answer item. A substitution item asks for the term whose definition matches the given phrase exactly, not the term that could be applied to such a person.
What to tell the student: 'For one-word substitution, match the definition word for word. If two options are both possible, choose the one whose core meaning is the phrase itself - polyglot is built from poly (many) and glot (tongue).' Then make the point to the class: this is a test of precise vocabulary, and precision is what the mark rewards.
3. Rewrite Item 7 (or Item 12) to remove the near-miss, and explain what the rewrite fixes.
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Rewritten Item 7: 'After a two-hour debate, the committee voted to ______ the proposal because it was too costly.' Options: reject / refuse / deny / decline.
What the rewrite fixes:
- 'Voted to' makes the subject a body acting formally, which rules out refuse and decline as natural choices.
- 'Because it was too costly' replaces 'on the grounds that' with plain cause, removing a phrase that pushed students toward formal wording they then matched to the wrong verb.
- The distractors stay plausible - all four are negative responses - so the item still discriminates, but only one is idiomatic in the frame.
An alternative is to convert the item to a matching task with definitions, which tests meaning rather than collocation. Either way, the principle is the same: a key is only fair if every distractor is clearly wrong for a reason the student can state. If you cannot state that reason in one line, the item needs rewriting before it is marked.