The false positive

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Suspicious English.

I gave the Ass classes their writing exam last week. Quite a few of the nitwits have lost marks for not re­pro­ducing the features of the text type. I wanted a title (preferably catchy), a short opening paragraph (also catchy), and a Q&A section, which would constitute the bulk of the interview. I didn't get that even although I told them more than once what they should’ve done.

It seems that some of the little darlings had been talking to the InterBac students because several of them gave me the embedded interview text type which I never mentioned. So not too many points for format.

One of the students in Ass β wrote something which seemed suspiciously good, but having managed to run it through turnitin (there were technical difficulties), it was found to be 100% original. I’m so used to students’ writing being a plethora of unnatural English that some piece of writing which demonstrates easy competence with idiomatic English comes as a surprise. Unfortunately, the text type was wrong, but if it hadn’t been, it would probably have got top marks.

This led me to do a survey of my English in comparison with this student’s, and with an article from The Guardian. I had a look at unique words in each piece, which for my writing and that from The Guardian turned out to be 144 out of 400 (a curious coincidence), but the student’s writing had a lower proportion. The definite article accounted for a tenth of the words I used; the proportion was slightly lower in The Guardian article; but the student used the article about a fifth as often as I did.

I’m not sure whether determining the frequency of the definite article is of any particular relevance. Since Chinese has no articles, it’s possible that they would naturally appear less often in a student’s writing, but the aim was to determine whether this was the student’s own work without depending on professional services. The question is what features of the text would reveal the truth about it? Use of vocabulary unique within the article? Range and use of non-lexical words? Frequency of certain constructions? (This student used as ADJ as Y several times, but never used “as” outside of that. Significant? Perhaps not.)

This morning, I was leaning towards originality even before I got the results from turnitin because of the smal­ler unique vocabulary, and a narrower range of conjunctions and non-lexical words.

As I said, it was unfortunate that this student wrote the wrong sort of response or she would’ve done very well.

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