Censor Sequel

So, last summer, folks got up in arms because the New York State Regents exams were bowdlerizing, censoring, altering, and otherwise messing around with the literature excerpts they included in the test.

As a result, they promised vigorously to never do so again, or, if they did, to at least indicate through elipses (…) where they were cutting material, and with [brackets] where paraphrases were taking place.

Sort of like we learned in English class.

Problem is, they’re still doing it.

In new guidelines, the state promised complete paragraphs with no deletions, but an excerpt from Kafka (on the importance of literature) changes his words and removes the middle of a paragraph without using ellipses, in the process deleting mentions of God and suicide.
The new state guidelines promised not to sanitize, but a passage on people’s conception of time from Aldous Huxley (a product of England’s colonial era) deletes the paragraphs on how unpunctual “the Oriental” is.

They also failed to note author names, as they had promised to, and messed up a passage on the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 such that it plausibly has multiple answers that are correct — though the state still thinks that only one of them is “clearly” correct.

The state denies there’s anything wrong with what they did, by the way, arguing that “sensitive” material was cut for length, that unmarked cuts took place in passages marked as “adapted,” and a section that quoted multiple writers was mushed into a single narrative because it would have been too confusing.

Riiiiiiight.

And these are the folks who are deciding whether the students are academically strong enough to pass.