They ‘hitted’ poorly and ‘maked’ many mistakes: examiners rue English exam howlers

School-leavers are going out into the world of work with a poor command of the English language, examiners have woefully remarked on the performance of candidates sitting for their English matriculation exams.

“It is of great concern that 16-year old students should be leaving school with such a poor command of the language after having been exposed to it throughout their school life,” an examiners’ report for the Matsec exam has stated.

Noting that candidates performed relatively well in their oral and aural components, the report denounced “inadequate levels” of grammatical accuracy, spelling, punctuation and expression as well as many instances of direct translation from Maltese. 

The report in fact calls for a greater effort from society as a whole to instill in students an increased awareness of the importance of English as an international language. 

It also warned that standards in English can only improve if the language is not merely regarded as a school subject, but used regularly and in different contexts.

Of particular concern was the level of spelling, especially among those sitting for paper B, the easier paper from which one can only be eligible for a passmark.

There was rampant misspelling of words in everyday use: it’s/its, there/their, hole/whole, were/wear, hear/here/her, alot/a lot. 

And there were a few instances when the candidates had flawless spelling, even when content, organization, vocabulary and syntax were poor.

Punctuation was, in a significant number of essays, “abysmal”.

“Candidates showed poor mastery of punctuation, the majority using only commas and full stops or a comma when no comma was needed,” examiners said. 

In a good number of cases candidates seemed unaware of the difference between a comma and a full stop, using them indiscriminately. 

Very few made use of the other punctuation marks: the colon, semi-colon, and exclamation and question marks.

And there was also consistent misuse of the apostrophe, with candidates confusing plurals and possessives such as “my sisters’ were in the criminals car”.

Candidates also made a haphazard use of the capital letter, with capital letters appearing in mid-sentences unnecessarily, and in the persistence of many in using ‘i’ for I.

A very great number of both Paper 2A and Paper 2B candidates, demonstrated a very poor grasp of the tenses. “There was a constant shifting of tenses mostly in the narrative task while students used the Past and Present Continuous/Perfect tenses when the Simple Past tense was called for.” 

When asked to write an email, the future ‘will’ and the conditional ‘would’ were used indiscriminately.

Other candidates seemed to be aware of only the Present Simple and the Past Simple. Another weakness where tenses are concerned appeared in the formation of the simple Past or the Past Participle. Examples of mistakes included ‘happened’, ‘maked’, ‘hitted’, ‘don’t tooked’, and ‘they have never saw’. 

Mistakes were also made in the use of the relative pronoun, with many showing an inability to distinguish between who and which and, in a few cases, the use of the personal pronouns we/us, I/me.

Only 188 (3.7%) of the 2,991 sitting for the exam were awarded a Grade 1 mark. But the vast majority, 63%, managed to pass the exam.