I'd call it a dangling element.  The SAT uses this pattern often, almost
always at the beginning of a sentence.  I tell my students that the person
( I use the term agent since it's not always a person) that is the first
noun you get to after the comma (possessive nouns don't count) MUST be the
agent described in the initial phrase.  Amelia Earhart was criticized, so
they must look for a fix that begins with Amelia Earhart.  Option e creates
a fragment, so it's d.

The protest question ETS would call an idiom issue.  One doesn't protest *
over* something.  If students find no out-and-out error in a sentence, they
should then search for idiom errors.  Generally, these involve wrong
prepositions.
The third kind of error on the Writing section (beyond grammar c.90% and
idioms c 6%) is diction (c 4%), when the wrong word is used.  Past such
errors are *indecisive* for *indefinite* in the following:
Despite the attorney's moving plea, the judge placed the juvenile offender
on probation for an indecisive period.

and *describe* for *ascribe* in:
Some paleontologists believe that mastodons died out because of human
hunting, while others describe the animals' extinction to climatic changes
at the end of the Ice Age.

I have found that explicit principles do apply to all the grammar
questions.  Except for the two other rare categories, students can identify
exactly what is wrong (or right) without depending on their uncertain
"ears."

 Jane Saral
On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 6:04 PM, John Chorazy
<[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Karl, Craig, and all - thank you for your responses.
>
> The SAT does include questions that pertain to usage issues that cannot be
> pinned down to a survey of high school grammar instruction. That's a
> separate issue, I suppose. Karl - in many cases with sentence corrections,
> the subject seems somehow out of place and not, as you notice, a modifier
> (or a single word in the case of my original model). Here's another:
>
> Although criticized by a few for her daredevil aviation escapades, *most
> people viewed Amelia Earhart as a skillful pilot.
> *
> (a) most people viewed Amelia Earhart as a skillful pilot
> (b) most people viewed Amelia Earhart to be a skillful pilot
> (c) a skillful pilot was what most people viewed Amelia Earhart as
> (d) Amelia Earhart was viewed by most people as a skillful pilot
> (e) Amelia Earhart, a skillful pilot in the view of most people
>
> Can we name the exact and explicit grammatical principle? It's not a
> misplaced modifier, since according to the question the subject and
> predicate is the underlined issue. What would you call that, in a certain,
> specific term? What would Warriner's call this?
>
> As far as an error being confined to the underlined choice, a question
> such as the one below defies that suggestion:
>
> *Given her strong sense* of social justice, Burns *vehemently* *protested
> over* her party's failure *to support* a tax decrease.
>
> Only a part of the underlined phrase "protested over" needs correction -
> the elimination of "over". What's the explicit grammatical principal? Is
> wordiness grammatical, or stylistic?
>
> Craig - your students need those terms from you because teachers at the
> High School level believe Hillocks et al since their college professors in
> Methods courses tout Hillocks et al. And then they come to department
> meetings and share articles from NCTE that tout Hillocks et al. Many
> students come to me, a teacher of 11th graders, not knowing that an adverb
> modifies a verb, and not knowing what it means to modify at all, frankly.
> That they are being exposed to these discussion is huge for them - yes, I
> do let them read your collective responses. And if they and their
> understandings are overly simplistic, as Karl suggests, it's because school
> teaches them 1+1=2 and the SAT gets you into college and the world teaches
> them that if you can sing well, run fast, look pretty, or the like then you
> can probably make a whole lot of money. You might be surprised, but 17 year
> old humans like to see things very clearly, especially if their teachers
> tell them so: Tiger Woods cheated on his wife and deserved what he got; War
> is bad and so was Bush; the "Nucleus" is that large oval body near the
> center of the cell, and other facts. They like formulas because they're
> constant and because you can use them on the test. When they take the SAT
> at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning, they're thinking one thing - how can I do
> this and pass with a score good enough to get me into my first choice
> college? It's not a conversation, it's a performance.
>
> Grammatical ambiguity on the SAT would be a lovely thing to assess, if
> teachers actually talked about it and also assessed student understanding
> of grammatical ambiguity in specific cases. I posed my initial question to
> the list because I found it interesting and because my students - young,
> impressionable, and actually willing to talk about things that others have
> labeled over their heads - wanted to know more. I believe they made a fair
> argument from their knowledge base, though I told them (as suggested in my
> first message) how they sentence was technically "correct." I'm not in the
> business of either critiquing or defending the SAT - my role is to get them
> ready for Craig.
>
> I thank you again for your help and for these wonderful conversations.
>
> John
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

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