That is not a new way of enumerating vowels. It stands for an exam called Unified International English Olympiad, conducted by Unified Council (UC). My daughter’s school makes it mandatory for its students to participate in a few of such Olympiads. The school also provides preparation material so she has to study a bit more than just her class textbooks. Of course, these Olympiads cover a bit more than the “usual” school syllabus. This phrase “a bit more” is the shady bit in all this Olympiad business because it seems the question-setters don’t know “how much more” should be “a bit more”!
Consider, for example, the UIEO exam for Class 3 held on 21 Nov this year. The first question reads:
1. Which option can be a v1/bare infinitive?
(A) Yard, (B) Foot, (C) Furlong, (D) Meter
It’s quite a timid looking fun question but what irritates me is the preparation material has nothing on “classification” of verbs.
[Similar thing happened in the Computer Science Olympiad conducted by SOF where “classification” of printers based on mechanism was expected of class 3 students! But that’s a story for another day.]
Talking about stuff NOT in the preparation material, consider this question:
3. Which option completes the (binomial) irreversible word pair ‘hills and
____’ correctly?
(A) plains, (B) mounds, (C) heights,
(D) valleys
Who the hell knows the phrase “binomial irreversible word pair” apart from language professors in esteemed humanities departments of even-higher-esteemed universities? Definitely not class 3 students who don’t even know the difference between parts of speech and figures of speech!
Similarly, another instance of rarely discussed grammar in class 3 features in this question:
6. Which option is not a gerund?
(A) Earning, (B) Enjoying,
(C) Outgoing, (D) Spending
But I won’t complain about this too much because I think past papers have asked about gerunds.
Next is the most dumbest question of the 35 questions in this exam paper:
13. Which option doesn’t rhyme with ‘Foul’.
(A) Owl, (B) Rout, (C) Tout, (D) Soul
What?!? Except (A), nothing rhymes with ‘Foul’. So is there a typo in the question, as in “doesn’t” → “does”? Apparently not! The “official” answer key says the answer is (D). Is the question-setter and proof-reader smoking something foul or what? [Who am I kidding? UC doesn’t have proof readers! Just look at the quality of answer key for NSTSE exam… Even in the first reading, I could edit / fix a few things and figure out one answer is completely wrong!] If the question-setter wanted (D) to be the answer, the word “option” should have been replaced with “vowel-sound” in the question, at the very least! And since this is an “English” exam, maybe they should look deep in their souls and decide: Should they be touting their knowledge with ill-phrased questions or routing their knowledge to something more wholesome? Be a wise owl (as depicted in some cultures) or just be an ulloo [उल्लू] (an idiot in Indian culture)! Another task the question-setter should be set is this: Write a poem where ‘foul’ rhymes with ‘rout’ and ‘tout’!
This question really upset me so I tried to fill in their discrepancy feedback form. But then just like they don’t have proof-readers for exams; their website-coders also don’t have quality-checkers! The web-form kept giving me server error because of badly formatted string or something in their code, so I asked my Superpartner to try submitting the form instead. She also received the same error so she just sent the screenshot of the form to the only email available on the website, stating:
Dear Team,
As I'm unable to submit the discrepancy online (server error), I'm pasting the screenshot below.
After two days, a reply was received from UC. A really funny reply:
Dear Sir,
Please share your query in detail to this email id.
Yes, their email is literally just that with the inline signature photo! And so my Superpartner sends an email back confirming that she had sent her original email to that exact same email:
Dear ××××××,
That's exactly the email that I have sent my query to.
And nobody ever replied! What a sham (or scam) of asking for feedback when they can’t be bothered to even accept it, forget about acknowledging it.
That turned out to be quite a long rant. Anyway, let’s move on to another question:
31. Shyam: Raj and Arun both stayed at Anil’s party throughout, but neither
could break the ice.
Raghu: __________
(A) Was there no spike available around?
(B) But Raj could have broken the ice, he is well built.
(C) Was the ice slab that thick?
(D) If you stick to ego, friends can’t stick to you.
What kind of moral high ground is this? (Of course, I’m talking about the correct answer D.) Is the question-setter watching too many soap operas? Who the hell talks like that in real life, esp. in the context of class 3 students? At this stage of life, maybe students should be taught to be less judgmental and more understanding! The correct answer shows a judgmental, preachy tone; instead one could have chosen a neutral, understanding tone with something like: “Well, they both have strong personalities. Hope they understand soon that sticking together is better than being alone!”. But then, nuance is not the forte of most people in the current state of the world.
Finally, last but not the least (irritating) of them all:
35. Which option can ‘not be an exclamation’?
(A) Yes, (B) Great, (C) No, (D) Come
I believe the answer is D, but the answer key says it’s B! [I wanted to submit feedback for this too, but as you all know by now, their feedback form error-ed out!] This is ridiculous, of course. “Great!” is an exclamation in situations of joy and appreciation and the like. For example, if my nephew says, “I scored 100% in my exams.”, I’d reply with “Great! Congrats!” and so on. “Come” is definitely not an exclamation on its own. I can think of using it only as “Come on! That’s stupid.”
