I'd love for this to be repeated with a piece of text that is not that. A friend who works as an English teacher at a community college pointed out that there might be a bit of cognitive bottlenecking going on - the inability to parse the text declines very quickly once you go above a certain percentage of missing vocabulary. This comment on there also adds some extra nuance: I fully expect the underlying point, that college student literacy has collapsed, is true, but I think the people who designed this test failed to build it in a way that it could possibly prove or disprove their hypotheses. At this level of difficulty, reading a text like this is a test of subject matter knowledge and reasoning ability, not literacy or English language skills. I used to get poor marks in French listening, speaking, and writing, but ace reading comprehension, because I had general knowledge and the ability to reason well with incomplete information. It wasn't reflective of my French skills when I overperformed in one of four French tests.I'm inclined to be very sympathetic to the students here. Those paragraphs may as well be in a different language, they're filled with words no-one uses anymore, or which are being used in ways these kids have never seen before (if you haven't encountered "whiskers" or "wonderful" in these contexts before you won't think to look them up in the dictionary just in case) and it's entirely reasonable for college students not to have learned the words for 19th century phenomena they will never encounter in their own lives (horse blinkers, Michaelmas). Even the fact they had a dictionary isn't the catch-all excuse you want it to be because if they have no incentive to get these questions right they won't be motivated to do twenty minutes of linguistic archaeology to answer these questions.
Maybe, but those examples seem to suggest that the kids weren't looking for metaphors, and couldn't let context take form from the abstract. My wife took a writing course at our local CC just a year or so after immigrating from China. She was by far the best writer in the class. It was like her peers were elementary school students.
Your wife is married to a white Ph.D scientist with a wikipedia page. She is, as the MAGAts like to say, a "global elite." Sure, she may not have been married to you at the time but it's not like you ordered her up out of the back of a magazine. I took some courses at a couple community colleges. I had the tallest degree in the room. "local community college" is not and should not be a wellspring of intellectual excellence.
Here's the problem: stupid vocabulary and tortured sentence structure are the hallmarks of advanced reading. That's the register. Much like the commenter, I absolutely dominated early childhood cognitive tests that required you to learn nonsense words, remember them for 48 hours, and then answer questions about their definitions. Problem was, they weren't nonsense words they were obscure English words and I generally knew most of them through reading. Here's Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, 1926: Here's Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, 1924: of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. That shit's so impenetrable that if you look it up online the glossary comes with. In fact, early assessment of Finnegan's Wake was that it was a piece of shit: Although the base language of the novel is English, it is an English that Joyce modified by combining and altering words from many languages into his own distinctive idiom. Some commentators believe this technique was Joyce's attempt to reproduce the way that memories, people, and places are mixed together and transformed in a dreaming or half-awakened state. What happened next, of course, is three generations of English majors climbed that Matterhorn to prove they could, then clapped each other on the back for their mountain climbing acumen, then looked down their noses at everyone who thinks Hemingway has any literary value. Take it from a pompous asshole. The key to literacy is to read the works of pompous assholes. The key to being celebrated by pompous assholes is to write like a pompous asshole.Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly’s star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend
The initial reception of Finnegans Wake was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of language to open hostility towards its seeming pointlessness and lack of respect for literary conventions. Joyce, however, asserted that every syllable was justified. Its allusive and experimental style has resulted in it having a reputation as one of the most difficult works in literature.
Slowly the book's critical capital began to rise to the point that, in 1957, Northrop Frye described Finnegans Wake as the "chief ironic epic of our time" and Anthony Burgess lauded the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page." Concerning the importance of such laughter, Darragh Greene has argued that the Wake through its series of puns, neologisms, compounds, and riddles shows the play of Wittgensteinian language-games, and by laughing at them, the reader learns how language makes the world and is freed from its snares and bewitchment.