Multiple-Choice Reading Quiz Answers Actually Selected by Students in Classes I Taught as a T.A. -The Toast

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notepad-593363_1280Previously by this author: 7 Essential Modernist Literary Life Hacks.

A metaphor is a word or phrase in a foreign language that poets choose to include simply because they are pretentious.

The title of William Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” provides an example of delusion.

When reviewing literature related to your essay topic, you should avoid sources that come from a country with which the United States has recently engaged in military conflict.

A discussion of a poet’s diction focuses on whether he or she wrote by hand, computer, typewriter, or Etch a Sketch™.

This week’s reading from Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft was about how a career in writing fiction is both lucrative and practical.

In a work of fiction, prose style is defined solely by the author’s choice of font (e.g., Courier New, Times New Roman, Book Antiqua).

Sentence length and prose rhythm are things that usually occur by accident, due to the nature of the English language.

In John Cheever’s short story, “The Swimmer,” Neddy Merrill never actually swims. The title is meant as a metaphor for Neddy’s attempts to “keep his head above water” in the “swimming pool of life.”

As an essayist, every piece of information you provide to your reader should be hypnotic.

The tone of your essay should seduce the reader with lyrical stylings the likes of which they have never encountered.

The following list includes the major components of rhetorical strategy often employed in a persuasive essay: panic, terror, outrage, catharsis.

Formal Reports are reserved for dealing with issues rooted in intergenerational conflict.

Formal Reports should never be handed in on Casual Fridays.

A Causal Analysis essay deals with a phenomenon or problem that isn’t really a big deal.

The body paragraphs of your essay should be printed in landscape format.

In Junot Diaz’s short story, “Fiesta 1980,” Papi’s relationship to “the Puerto Rican woman” can best be described as a collaboration between two avant-garde performance artists.

In your essays, you should not try to address anticipated objections to your arguments, because unless you are psychic it is impossible to know what other people are thinking.

Topic sentences must be presented at the end of an essay in an index.

In Kelly Link’s short story, “Stone Animals,” the child Henry loves most is Amanda the Panda.

In Kelly Link’s short story, “Stone Animals,” the child Henry loves most is Lil’ Peanut.

In Kelly Link’s short story, “Stone Animals,” the child Henry loves most is “the one he never had.”

In Stephen Marche’s essay “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”, social media-induced loneliness is described as a worldwide epidemic, sparing only a tiny area on the U.S.’s northeastern seaboard known as “Rhode Island.”

Conclusions and recommendations at the end of an essay should always be written in Latin.

Your essay’s thesis statement should be a challenging puzzle, solvable by only the most quick-witted of readers.

The three types of proposal essays are: decent proposal, indecent proposal, Sharon Stone.

Emma Smith-Stevens lives and writes in Gainesville, Florida.

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"The following list includes the major components of rhetorical strategy often employed in a persuasive essay: panic, terror, outrage, catharsis."

The student who selected this response later went on to a lucrative career writing headlines for Fox News.
Well, you are a treasure, no matter what these students are choosing to learn.

(I thought the first one was going to be my favorite, until I got to "This week’s reading from Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft was about how a career in writing fiction is both lucrative and practical.")
2 replies · active 525 weeks ago
That one was my favorite until I got to "The three types of proposal essays are: decent proposal, indecent proposal, Sharon Stone."
Which in turn was MY favorite, until I got to "The body paragraphs of your essay should be printed in landscape format."
As with surveys, if you compose a ludicrous but entertaining option, it's your fault when they select that as their response.

Also, some of these are correct, right?
Choosing "C" for everything CAN backfire on you, kids!
As an essayist, every piece of information you provide to your reader should be hypnotic.

The tone of your essay should seduce the reader with lyrical stylings the likes of which they have never encountered.


Well, they're not bad goals...
3 replies · active 524 weeks ago
In high school US History, we got a multiple-choice option for "What are the two big questions of history" or some such that read: "What happened? And, who cares?"

I was surprised, on entering graduate school, to learn that this should have been the right answer.
There's a lot of things they tell you in high school are the wrong answers and then in college you realize you'd be fed a load of horse shit.
That's hilarious because I have been dining out for many years on a stray remark one of my literature professors made about some job talks he had witnessed, which was that they "failed to answer the "so what?" question." It turns out this is a great diagnostic of whether someone's done their job in almost any piece of writing/speaking, and I often quote it. I guess "what happened and who cares" is the history/journalism version.
I might be able to get on board with that Junot Diaz one, though.
1 reply · active 525 weeks ago
Yeah, I think everyone's having a better time all round in that story.
So you're saying my thesis statement should NOT be a puzzle? If only I'd known!
1 reply · active 525 weeks ago
But what if it's ABOUT puzzles? What then?
Delightful. Also, unless these are lightly edited I think this is a pretty literate group of students, amusing answers notwithstanding.
3 replies · active 524 weeks ago
These are the results of multiple choice testing, so students were able to select amusing answers but not to write them. Essay answers or fill in the blanks might've provided more beautfully boggling examples of spelling, grammar, and logic. :)
Ah, haha, missed that! Reading comprehension...
you really should submit a list of boggling student essay excerpts! i would if i'd kept any boggling essays.
I can't even pretend I wouldn't go with the troll answers.
Lethologica's avatar

Lethologica · 525 weeks ago

Before reading this, I remembered joke choices on multiple choice quizzes only as annoyances to be ignored. Thank you for improving my childhood.
These must have been fun to write. I think the Latin one is my favorite.

I worked a short-term temp job grading standardized tests once upon a time. My absolute favorite was reading the fourth grade essays/stories. "And then the alien said, 'I will suck your brain out with a bendy straw!'" "I screamed at the top of my big red lungs!"
3 replies · active 524 weeks ago
Are you familiar with Axe Cop?
Well I am now, and I know what my brother and nephew will be getting for Christmas!

Some more favorites, now that I'm on my computer at home:

“I thinked and thinked and just to make a change of paste I thinked some more.”

“We were shivering with fearful, fearce, fear.”

“We went to monster.com but there were no monsters there. It was a grownup website.”
"fearful, fearce, fear"

So wonderful! I would read a novel with that title.
I took a break in the middle of this list to enjoy "The Swimmer" by John Cheever. Here is a link if anyone else wants to read it, it was awesome:

http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Cheever_Swimmer.pdf
1 reply · active 525 weeks ago
Crap. I've only ever made modest proposals. Been doing it wrong for years evidently.
The body paragraphs of your essay should be printed in landscape format.

NOOOOOOOOOO.

I don't know why this one made me cringe the most.
The tone of your essay should seduce the reader with lyrical stylings the likes of which they have never encountered.

I mean, that's why we all read The Toast, so it seems like a reasonable answer.

Also, I hate troll options on multiple choice tests, because I always want to choose them. I'm not entirely sure what this reveals about my psyche, and I'm even less sure I want to.
1 reply · active 524 weeks ago
I've always enjoyed writing troll answers, whenever I'm asked to create quizzes (note: I am NOT a teacher), until I learned from someone who'd gotten a masters in Instructional Design that that's actually a really irresponsible teaching practice, because most students know to throw that one out, so it narrows down the number of possible correct answers for them. Not a good way to check that the students are actually learning. But I think multiple choice answers are really about making it easier for teachers to grade.
Topic sentences must be presented at the end of an essay in an index.

Though TBH I feel like if I made my students do this their essays would be a lot faster to grade.
This was very fun.

I'm reminded of a time in my senior year of high school, we were surprised by a quiz on a Russian short story NO ONE had read. I got a 75%. I credit that to my decade-plus of years being a Voracious Reader giving me an edge in guessing what the most likely right answer was, and also because multiple-choice is often a crap way to test students.
this is a great way to both identify your worst students & entertain the best ones.

one of my favorite teachers ever taught European History when I was in 11th grade; he was one of those awesome lovable curmudgeon types with a great sense of humor, & he was a big fan of joke answers on tests.

on one exam, there was a a multiple-choice question about the animal chiefly responsible for transmitting the plague, & almost everyone got it wrong, selecting "rats" instead of the correct answer, which was "fleas." after a heated debate--the fleas were ON the rats, so weren't the rats implicated as well, & also, the intro to the series of history-lesson videos we watched included a shot of rats climbing along ships' moorings with a title card referencing the Black Death--he begrudgingly gave credit for either answer.

...& then on the final, the same question appeared, & the choices were something like:

a) rats and only rats
b) rats being carried by fleas
c) fleas being carried by rats
d) fleas riding tiny flea-sized horses
e) unnecessarily forgiving history teachers

(I'm sure I'm not doing justice to the original, but I'm also sure that my parents wouldn't be interested in doing several hours worth of digging through the basement to see if a copy of a 15-year-old history test is among my personal archives, so you'll have to make do with this tribute, Tenacious D-style.)
1 reply · active 517 weeks ago
Since we're being sassy on multiple choice, the correct answer is obviously to write in "f) humans."
1. True or False: Scout is a girl.

80% of them got it wrong.

Sigh.
I loved it when professors would put jokey answers on their Scantron tests, but I never realized people actually... chose... them.

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