My year-one UBD exam had the following question:
A digraph is two letters in the spelling that are used to represent a single sound. What is the digraph that is used in most cases in English to represent the velar nasal?
The correct answer to this is 'ng', but of the 49 students taking the exam, only 6 gave this answer. Instead, 36 wrote gave the answer /ŋ/ (while the remaining 7 wrote something else).
I don't get this – how is /ŋ/ 'two letters'? I don't understand why students are so bad at reading the question.
Well, it's only worth 1 mark, and many of the 36 who wrote /ŋ/ did really well on the rest of the exam, so some of them should get an A grade. But still, why don't they read the question?
