Why teacher deducted points on spelling test leaves teen furious

A teenager has shared his frustration after receiving two failing grades on what appeared to be a simple English spelling test.

The grades, attributed to a misheard word and a confusing grading decision, left the student perplexed. Sharing a snapshot of the test on Reddit in May, the Israeli student, who wished to remain anonymous, showed the unexpected spelling section of his English test that caught him off guard.

“There wasn't supposed to be a spelling section on the test. I was surprised when we got one, and it had no relation to the rest of the test, the material, or anything else,” the teen said. News week.

The frustration peaked with two words: “absence” and “language”. Although the student admitted to mishearing the word “absence” with “accents,” resulting in a spelling error, the real frustration came with the last word.

The word “language,” which the student had spelled correctly on the test, was marked incorrectly, leaving him confused and frustrated.

It seemed that the handwriting had confused the teacher who may have confused the “n” with a “u”, but the student was confused and shared what happened on the subreddit r/slightly infuriating from Reddit.

“When I got the test back, I said out loud, ‘Do you see this shit?’” the student said. “I posted on Reddit because, immediately after testing, I found the r/subreddit slightly infuriating and knew it would be a success.”

English test boredom quickly gained traction, with 23,000 upvotes and more than 1,000 comments as Reddit users shared their thoughts.

“I hated when my teachers did that, like you know, DAMN WELL, that's a n,” Moth-slurping-lamps wrote.

TheHorizonLies posted that the problem lay in the student's writing: “Your lowercase n in the language looks like a u. Work on your writing and you'll get full marks.”

Others were invited to share their own stories of testing issues.

“In third grade, I heard 'neighborhood' on a spelling test and spelled it correctly,” commented zrice03. “But it was actually supposed to be 'water' and it was misnotated. I swear the teacher pronounced it weird on purpose…it's still salty to this day.”

Emmetalbenny posted: “Dude, in elementary school I lost a spelling bee because the judges wouldn't pronounce the word clearly, so I spelled something completely different. Ironically, the word was 'incomprehensible'.”

This isn't the first time a teacher's spelling correction has attracted viral attention. Earlier this year, netizens were stunned when a teacher incorrectly changed the spelling of a student's homework. And, in 2022, a question on a fifth-grade homework assignment left people perplexed, prompting the parent to contact the math teacher for the answer.