Starting next year, Oregon high school and middle school students will be allowed to use spell check on the state writing test. Yes, you red that right. Education officials say that it will allow graders too focus more on the righting style and quality of the righting and less on typos.

The decision to allow spell check was made buy an administrative panel that met throughout the passed year and apparently found no use in making people remember and use the fundamentals of written communication.

“We are not letting a students keyboarding skills get in the way of being able to judge there righting ability,” said state Superintendent Susan Castillo. “As we’re using technology to improve what we’re doing with assessments as a nation, we believe that spell check will be won of those tools.”

Likewise, Rep. Sherrie Sprenger, R-Scio, called spell check a valuable tool to help students with pour spelling skills to adapt (read: not have to understand why they have to type “their” instead of “there”). Others said it would be fairer to student’s whom were trying to demonstrate proficiency in a subject mater, not prove they’re grammar skills.

Fourth graders wood knot be able to use automatic spell check on the test because it’s too important to learn the fundamentals of grammar, the department of education says. But apparently if you haven’t learned it by then, a simple button clique is good enough to replace these skills for the rest of your life.

Spell check is already allowed on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or “the nations report card” as it is called, and Oregon was a pioneer in online adaptive testing for students’. Test takers can currently have access to a dictionary, but in the passed they have been restricted from using an automated spell checker.

The new spell checker wouldn’t automatically correct errors, but it wood automatically catches them and give suggestion for words to replace misspelled ones with.

Editor’s Note: I decided to follow the Department of Education’s advice and use spell check to adapt my life and embrace technology. Instead of editing, I ran spell check and called it good. Do you have any idea how many times you can check Face book in the amount of time it takes to edit a 375 word story? Talk about change for the better.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 20th, 2010 at 12:00 by Ben Maras and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.