I'll be announcing these quizzes on Substack after April 10, but you blog readers get the announcement first: The quiz for Verbs, Part 1 is now up. I didn't check it through quite as thoroughly as the previous quizzes, but I did run through variations of the quiz eight or nine times, and the "game play" seems all right. But you can help me out by trying the quiz out and seeing whether it works. Of course, to access my Verbs, Part 1 article to see what the answers are supposed to be, you'd need to become a paying subscriber, so if you don't do that, and you think you've found something wrong (or if you dispute something that the quiz has deemed wrong), leave a comment, and I'll either reply with quotes from my Substack article to justify the quiz's reasoning or affirm that you've found a legitimate mistake that needs correction.
Thursday, April 02, 2026
3 comments:
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I'll leave my comments here rather than on the quiz itself (to avoid spoilers for others).
ReplyDeleteThe questions that I got mentioned "action" verbs, but the examples mentioned "active" verbs. Most reasonable people will be able to figure this out, but standardizing the terminology might be a good idea.
The question about choosing lists of active vs stative verbs was also a little vague. Do we mean verbs that can only be active or stative, or verbs that can be or are usually active or stative? Verbs like "become" and "appear" are usually stative, but they can also be active ("He is becoming a nuisance; we should eliminate him as soon as possible." / "That suit becomes you!" / "He appeared before the crowd wearing a top hat and nothing else."). I figured you meant the latter (that is, can be or usually are stative), and since I got 100% on the quiz apparently I was right. But you might want to make the wording of the question a little clearer.
I also got a question that asked me how many action verbs there were in a sentence. This is obviously a single-answer question, unlike the other questions, but it still had the checkbox options, allowing me to conceivably answer one, two, three, and four. Granted, only an idiot would do so, but it seems like this question should have radio buttons, not checkboxes. And I would then change the text at the top of the quiz to say "Multiple answers may be possible" (instead of "are possible"), since that is clearly not the case here.
Charles,
DeleteDo you mean this question?
Examples of action and stative verbs are—
ACTIVE: run, eat, read, speak; STATIVE: agree, become, taste (e.g., taste good), matter
ACTIVE: coil up, put down, rear up; STATIVE: prefer, matter, appear
ACTIVE: hurtle, overtake, sneer, look; STATIVE: intend, anticipate, realize, hate
ACTIVE: draw, like, have, mow; STATIVE: remember, conclude, drink, leap
Yeah, that's an outright mistake. I'll get right on it. In my lesson, I do go over how these verbs are called "action" or "active" or "dynamic" verbs, so it's not tragic as mistakes go, but you're right that terminology should be standardized.
The Substack lesson also covers the potential for vagueness with many verbs, which can be either active or stative according to context. For the quiz, I tried to choose obvious examples of each. (I don't design my quizzes and tests to contain a lot of "tricks," which I find to be an underhanded way to design exams: With "tricksy" exams, the skill being tested for is whether a student can suss out the trick.)
As for the radio-button issue... getting the AI to depart from the original formatting is like pulling teeth (as I've already discovered in trying to create matching, sequencing, and fill-in-the-blanks questions), so I'm inclined to leave the "question for idiots" alone. Upshot: The idiots get the usual 16 possibilities instead of just 4.
As to whether I'll change "are possible" to "may be possible" for this one question... I'll think about it. Since "are possible" appears at the very top, those instructions are meant to apply generally to the quiz as a whole, not to each specific question individually.
UPDATE: "action/active" now corrected, along with some other problems.
On that last part, I was actually suggesting that the "are possible" at the top be changed to "may be possible"--not just for that one question. That way it applies equally to every question. Some questions might have more than one answer, while others might not.
Delete