The most telling message in this article is the mindlessness of this kind of testing. The errors in themselves put in question the competence of the people constructing them, but more importantly, they show what a distorted view of language competence underlies the test. Items of this kind claim to represent what's important in our language, but in reality they range from the debatable to the trivial.

What is most worrying here is the thought of how a teacher might teach students to do well on such a test (which government policy will inevitably force teachers to do). If the test drives teaching, the emphasis will be on the disjointed, abstract, decontextualised, trivial, arbitrary and artificial mastery of language that the test implicitly values.

Heaven help our students, our language, and us.

Godo,

"the emphasis will be on the disjointed, abstract, decontextualised, trivial, arbitrary and artificial mastery of language..."

Spot on!

You could change the last word "language", that I have quoted from you post, and replace it with "learning", and your comment would be even more pertinent.

I hope the people on the Senate NAPLAN enquiry committee read this! (By the way, isn't the answer to the footy on the oval section (c)?)

I also thought it was poor placememt, for Grade 3 kids that question 1 for spelling required kids to correct "deep BLOO colour" whilst question 2 had the sentence "The warm BREES blew the leaves". The blue/blew homophones may have unintentionally confused some students.

In Year 5, Grammar and Punctuation question 5 reads: "Which word in this sentence is an adjective (describing word)?" and the sentence given is "The old horse walked slowly around the oval." Now, the correct answer is "old" because adjectives describe nouns (ie "horse"), but there are actually two describing words in the sentence, the other being "slowly". This is an adverb and adverbs can describe verbs, adjectives or other adverbs. In this case it describes the verb "walked". Assuming that the sentence is deliberately constructed so that it has two describing words and that national productivity will go down the gurgler if Grade 5 kiddies haven't yet learned the difference between an adjective and an adverb, why be so bloody helpful as to confuse kids with the words in parentheses?