a vexing suneung problem: Walt Fucking Whitman

Making the rounds through the Twitter- and Redditsphere today is this screen grab of a suneung (Korean college-entrance exam: the College Scholastic Ability Test, or CSAT) problem from the English-reading section (probably not from this year's test):

At first blush, the above looks almost like a GRE-level reading-comp question. I don't envy the poor kids who had to make their way through questions like this.

Glancing quickly at the CSAT problem on my phone this morning while I was taking a dump, I tweeted my own guess that the correct answer would be (2). Other fellow Twits, like Barry White and Irish journo John Power, replied that they thought the correct answer was (3). This gave me pause, so I went back, reread more carefully, and decided that Barry and John were right. The guy whose tweet I'd originally seen, Stewart Gray, then piped up and said he'd heard a rumor that the correct answer was actually (4). John, true to his deceitful, untrustworthy nature,* backtracked and said he'd meant (4).

All of us agreed that the question was a poor one, although I imagine we all had different reasons for believing this. I'd like to go over why I think the question is poorly constructed, so bear with me as I get anal...ytical.

The reason why I was initially attracted to (2) as the correct answer was that the very next sentence after the blank makes mention of "the instability of American democracy." This notion dovetailed neatly with the idea of "political chaos," and it didn't seem out of bounds, or otherwise inconsistent with the rest of the text, that Whitman might be seeking "poetic purity." So (2) initially made sense.

But as I looked harder at (3), after Barry and John had told me their own answers, the phrase "in literature itself" seemed to match the idea of "the poet and his work." With some consideration, this called out more strongly to me than did (2), especially when I reread the paragraph and figured that "the instability of democracy" was probably being used in a denigrating way, not as a source of inspiration for writing eternally relevant poetry.

As Barry pointed out after doing some research, (4) is objectively correct: it's what the actual, original passage says. Note, though, that if you examine the linked passage carefully, there are differences between it and the above-pictured text. In fact, the above-pictured text looks suspiciously like plagiarism: only a few words and phrases have been changed from the original in a lame, half-hearted attempt at paraphrasing. Otherwise, the quoted text is a word-for-word copy of the original. (At least, I'm assuming that the passage to which I've linked in Google Books is the original.)

The original text, which is slightly longer, contains enough clarifying context to make (4) a more plausible choice, but now there's this ethical problem staring us in the face: the CSAT's text really seems to have come from a source that engaged in plagiarism. This doesn't mean that the students taking the test were somehow complicit in this act, but it does mean that the process by which the Whitman text ended up on the test was likely not a scrupulous one. Par for the course in ethically impaired Korea.

I'm not convinced that this test question was all that mindfully constructed. First, there's the plagiarism issue, with the compromised text having been altered just enough to introduce some vagueness as to what the correct answer must be. Then there's the reading-comp question itself, which could be seen as having been cleverly constructed (I gave you my justifications for why [2] and [3] were plausible answers), but which I think was rather lazily written: someone just took a chunk of text about Whitman, scissored out a random phrase, and negligently wrote up some alternative answers.

When you construct reading-comprehension questions, you need one answer to be obviously and objectively correct. All evidence should point to that answer, and that evidence should become visible if you look and think long enough. Students who take test-prep courses are taught (as I myself used to teach back when I was at YB in Virginia) that they shouldn't look for a good answer: they have to find the best answer. It's a poorly constructed question that makes it vague as to what the best answer is.

So I don't know. Instinctively, I dislike the question as it's written. And I suspect plagiarism. I'm man enough to admit there may be some sour grapes involved in my disliking the question, but I honestly think there are objective technical and ethical problems with it.

But that's just me.

NB: I've been calling this a reading-comprehension problem, but really, it's more like a bloated version of an SAT-style Sentence Completion question. The same reading and thinking skills used for SAT-SC are applicable to this CSAT problem.

ADDENDUM: The idea that there might be plagiarism involved is disturbing and confusing. We paraphrase a text in order to avoid plagiarism, don't we? So why this weird mix of direct quoting and paraphrase? The reason I suspect foul play is that I've heard of cases like this before—cases where one author cribs from another, changing only a few words here and there, but otherwise preserving 90% of the original text, then claiming it as his own. The CSAT text has that same feel to me. Dirty. Tainted. With a whiff of corruption.

Then there's the fact that such standardized tests normally quote directly from the original text (with permission, one would assume), so why paraphrase at all? Why not simply get reprint permission, then quote freely from the original? The whole thing is a mess.

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*Is he deceitful because he's a journalist or because he's a stinkin' Irish shit pig?


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