> You can’t blame demographic shifts or foreign students on these results
I don't think that it matters. I'm not a native speaker and I did on that sample better then the most. I'm just one point of data, but I believe what does matter is not a proficiency with English itself, but with reading in general. English of Dickens is hard ("the waters had but newly retired" took me a minute to parse), but I can see what I can't understand, so I can spend time on it and get it.
Probably I could miss with "Michaelmas". In hindsight after reading the article I see it ends with "-mas", like "Christmas", but I'm not sure I'd look up it in Google if I took the test seriously.
OTOH, I noticed this "The student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily", and it made me think, that the student was nervous. But why? And why the researchers didn't tried to reduce stress levels? Stress makes intellectual tasks harder. I know it from my own experience, the worst kind of stress for me is when I believe that I have very limited time for a task. In these situations I could do unbelievable dumb things.
I don't think that it matters. I'm not a native speaker and I did on that sample better then the most. I'm just one point of data, but I believe what does matter is not a proficiency with English itself, but with reading in general. English of Dickens is hard ("the waters had but newly retired" took me a minute to parse), but I can see what I can't understand, so I can spend time on it and get it.
Probably I could miss with "Michaelmas". In hindsight after reading the article I see it ends with "-mas", like "Christmas", but I'm not sure I'd look up it in Google if I took the test seriously.
OTOH, I noticed this "The student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily", and it made me think, that the student was nervous. But why? And why the researchers didn't tried to reduce stress levels? Stress makes intellectual tasks harder. I know it from my own experience, the worst kind of stress for me is when I believe that I have very limited time for a task. In these situations I could do unbelievable dumb things.