I thought the fact that 23% of Florida’s third graders will be held back because they failed the FCAT was bad, and that the state has lowered the pass score for high school students was even worse, but this just blows them all away:
Recent results from the standardized Perl Fluency Test showed that 99.99% of US high school seniors can’t read Perl. This disturbing statistic shows that American students are painfully unprepared for life after graduation.
[…]
The four hour test had 2 sections, a simple translation section and a project section. The first part asked students to translate easy Perl phrases into their standard English equivalent, and the second section required students to produce a simple MP3 player in Perl. “I didn’t know what the hell any of it meant,” said one Senior, “it had lots of slashes and periods and brackets. It was so confusing. I’m feeling rather nauseous.”
It’s sad that our educational system is failing so many young people.
How will these people function in the real world? I feel so sorry for those 99.99%’ers who are so ill-prepared to handle the every day challeneges of life after high school I’m really kind of broken up over this. It’s time to lobby your senators and state representatives. More money to the Monks. Please, local money, state money, your lunch money. Give it to the perl monks so we can make one last redemption effort to save today’s youth.
Left by Jordan on May 14th, 2003
Whoa, that was a great post. Informative and hilarious all at once. Thanks!
Left by David on May 15th, 2003
As one of these high-schoolers, I have to ask: What’s Perl…? Time to google, I guess…
Left by Brittany on October 8th, 2003
I looked up some of the scripts I cooked up last semester, and I could not for the life of me understand what I was thinking at the time, nor what the point of the script was. Perl is the devil.
Left by Dave on October 8th, 2003
Yeah, I really think that Perl is the computer equivalent to the ancient Chinese literary language (which was made intentionally difficult so that commoners could not read and learn scholarly materials).
Left by John on October 9th, 2003