On A Related Note

This goes along with Megan's grammar post, but it's more than just that.

Today I began 3 days of classes that supposedly will prepare me for my upcoming professional exam. I'm paying out the wazoo for this ($350 to be exact) so I was hoping to, you know, actually learn something. I guess that is asking too much.

Here's an excerpt directly from the practice test they gave us. You don't have to know a thing about interior design, or really even have graduated elementary school, to see what's wrong with it.

"Including all of the following, EXCEPT ____, can facilitate a healthy and safe working environment."

That is not even a sentence. A monkey could rip random words out of the dictionary and put together a better question than that. That vagabond Megan mentioned is getting tied to the horses as we speak, but let's move on to the next question, shall we?

"Universal design is defined as 'design for all people.' The underlying principles of universal design include:
a. accessibility, cost effectiveness, adaptability
b. accessibility, aesthetics, affordability
c. supportive, adaptive, accessible
d. safety, aesthetics, supportive."

Can these people not distinguish between a noun and an adjective? "Accessibility" can be a principle of design. "Accessible" is what your mom is. Oops....I mean, "accessible" is not a noun and therefore cannot be a principle of design. You can't just arbitrarily interchange the two. Options A and B are just fine, but I guess the monkey went on his lunch break and let a total moron take over from there. C is totally backwards, and D is a lovely mix of both nouns and adjectives in case you are feeling sort of grammatically ambivalent that day. Here's the best part....the correct answer is C.

I could go through all 137 questions, but I'm hoping if I stop now they'll let the vagabond go. Let me just briefly highlight some of the other blatant errors:
--Two identical questions, each with a different "correct" answer
--Random words inserted where they don't belong (i.e. "only the ground floor must to be accessible")
--Misuse of homonyms ("principle" instead of "principal")
--Two related questions that contradicted each other
--Questions with no correct answer
--Questions that listed the same answer twice
--Questions that were vague, misleading, or that split hairs between two very similar terms

When asked to address the vague questions and how to approach these on the exam, our instructors were oh so helpful: "Well....you're not going to get every single question right."

WHY am I giving these people my hard earned money???

Textbook Trauma

I ordered a textbook from Half.com from a seller that has a very good rating. The book arrived very quickly and appeared to be in fine condition.

It wasn't until today when I went to do my Qualitative reading assignment this morning that I discovered that pages 81-128 are missing. For those of you not too adept at math, that is approximately 50 pages (encompassing an entire chapter and parts of two others) that are not in the book.

Astonishingly enough, that makes it slightly difficult for me to complete the assigned readings. Because I was lacking in pages, I was forced to pay an extra $2.50 to make copies from someone else's book, which is a considerable amount of money to someone with my financial standing. Additionally, the money that I had to fork over for copies severely diminishes my total savings from ordering my textbooks online. Textbook seller: please go crawl into an abandoned mine shaft and die.

Also to the seller of the book: FUCK YOU for not mentioning that minor detail in your book description. Next time, double check your product before dicking over your customers.


Note: I have sent the seller a message about this defect, so depending on the response, there may be an update to this post.