Excusing the punning, it is easy to just play games with these rather than maintain a focus on how they fail as ‘tests’ of writing competence [and by extension, as a part of the purposeful teaching and learning of Writing], so here I want to also query how the question can only be worth 1 mark for three required ‘correct’ answers compared with a question about placing a single comma in a sentence which is also worth 1 mark.

It is yet another layer of inconsistency and irrelevance when looking at these. The primary objection is to the discrete and disparate nature of the questions themselves – designed simply to provide ‘data’ – but when the marking system is also hopeless, that compounds the nonsense of it all.

It is more complex than this, I know, but I shouldn’t need to explain further.