I have recently reviewed a large number of SAT grammar questions and can
state confidently that the College Board takes a very traditional view
of "they" vs. "he or she." There are no sentences that accept "they" as
correct for any grammatically singular antecedent.

That said, the question writers appear to finesse certain troublesome
areas. For example, there have been questions of the "everyone returned
to _their_ seat" variety, and the explanations in the College Board's
online course cast the problem in terms of indefinite pronouns needing
singular antecedents, but note that "their seat" is a number mismatch,
so there's really a problem whether you accept the traditional rule or
not. I have not yet found a sentence that would require a student to
choose between something like "Everyone returned to his or her seat" and
"Everyone returned to their seats."

The questions also totally avoid sentences of the form, "Everyone was
speaking Spanish, so I spoke Spanish with _them_," where trying to
follow the traditional rule leads to nonsense.

The question of the day you reference is interesting. I have long
wondered whether the questions they use have ever actually appeared on
operational tests because they sometimes seem on the surface to have
problems that should rule them out for technical reasons.

The actual verb in this case can be either present or past tense
depending on the purpose of the writer, but as you say, students are
often taught "present tense for writing" in a reductive way that might
lead them to pick A as an error. That would theoretically lead to a
situation where students completely untutored in grammar would get the
question right, those with partial knowledge would miss it, and those
with full knowledge would get it right. In that case, the chances of the
student getting the question right would be poorly correlated to that
student's overall ability.

Of course how such questions actually perform is hard to estimate in
advance. It may be that low-performing students make some other error.
Without seeing actual statistics like a biserial correlation, it's
impossible to know.

Karl

Nancy Tuten wrote:
> So are you saying, Alison, that the SAT and other standardized tests would
> find such usage preferable? Most of the SAT questions provide choices, and
> if one of the choices were to recast the sentence to avoid pairing the
> singular noun with the plural "their," would that not be the "correct"
> choice? 
> 
>  
> 
> By the way, the answer to today's SAT "question of the day" is a good
> example of why we don't need that tail to wag this dog. See it at
> http://apps.collegeboard.com/qotd/question.do. I chose option "A" because I
> thought the verb needed to be in the present tense. I imagine that a lot of
> students who have been taught to refer to published writing in the present
> tense would also have made that selection. 
> 
>  
> 
> Nancy 
> 
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alison Cochrane
> Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 11:52 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: more teaching questions on grammar
> 
>  
> 
> Natalie,
> 
>  
> 
> The third person plural subject/possessive pronoun has become widely
> accepted recently for standardization purposes instead of continually
> writing he/she.
> 
>  
> 
> Alison
> 
> QCC
> 
> New York, NY
> 
>  
> 
> "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up
> where I needed to be. " 
> ~ Kahlil Douglas Adams
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
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