They don’t need to have the knowledge memorized. They had full access to google and a dictionary to look up anything they found confusing, and couldn’t even do that. The test was of their ability to figure out a somewhat difficult text, not of their historical knowledge.
I didn’t clock that they had Google access when reading through it earlier, I thought they were limited purely to a dictionary/encyclopedia lookup. That does make it a little more damning.
That’s just what high literacy - which is expected of English majors, especially by their third and fourth year - requires.
According to ACT, Inc., this level of literacy translates to a 33–36 score on the Reading Comprehension section of the ACT (Reading).
In 2015, incoming freshmen from both universities had an average ACT Reading score of 22.4 out of a possible 36 points, above the national ACT Reading score of 21.4 for that same year.
At what point does the test become “do you have very specific historical knowledge that is functionally trivia for any real world use case?” though?
They don’t need to have the knowledge memorized. They had full access to google and a dictionary to look up anything they found confusing, and couldn’t even do that. The test was of their ability to figure out a somewhat difficult text, not of their historical knowledge.
I didn’t clock that they had Google access when reading through it earlier, I thought they were limited purely to a dictionary/encyclopedia lookup. That does make it a little more damning.
That’s just what high literacy - which is expected of English majors, especially by their third and fourth year - requires.