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.