Can students be penalized for referring to Emma by the name of Emily in their short responses?
Students should not be penalized for referring to Emma by the name of Emily in their short responses despite the fact that the questions are regarding Emma. Scorers were advised during the Grades 4 & 8 tests that students should not be penalized for listening/confusion errors in their responses. Examples of listening errors are: referring to characters by the use of an incorrect pronoun, reference to the incorrect year in which an event occurred, and attributing an action to the wrong character in an otherwise well-developed constructed response. A students written response should be scored as a whole. Since students are unable to reference written material to create their responses in the listening section, they are given allowance for listening/confusion errors.
