Is it Holdup or Held up?

Is it just me or is English on American television just awful?

During an episode of Smallville where Lois’ sister scams the gang out of 50 000 dollars, a sentence caught my attention. That sentence was, “She’s been holdup in her room all day”.

I don’t know if they use the same writers but since then, I’ve heard it on Scrubs, too. Well, I’m sorry to say but according to the New Oxford American Dictionary “holdup” is a noun as in “stickup”, “heist”, or “burglary”, and not a verb.

A Canadian Marking with the 7-point Scale

Something that has boggled my mind is the 7-point marking system used in Chile. If you grew up in Canada as I did, you may be used to thinking in a different few systems, metric, and imperial –which in the Canadian experience works out to feet and inches for height, onces and pounds for weight (except when buying groceries when metric is also posted). Moving away from footage and weight, exams and assignments in Canada are always marked in percentages, with 50% normally signaling minimum achievement and working all the way up to 100% for a perfect mark (which is never given). Now, it’s true that these percentages have “always” been converted into some letter based system, but this has always been at the end of the course, semester, or the school year –and so Canadians (as previously mentioned) understand and mainly think along the lines of a percent based marking system.

As can be deduced from above, being asked to mark using this 7-point scale has sometimes been awkward. It doesn’t help that Chilean teachers I’ve spoken with don’t work with percentages at all, some of which mark in what can only be termed qualitatively rather than quantitatively (a huge problem IMHO. Gd, I’ve been asked to be on Chilean “university” evaluative boards where rubrics weren’t required and certainly weren’t standard, but I’m getting off topic). Formulas to which you can input percentages –usually in the way of a spreadsheet– are sometimes provided by institutions. They usually consider more than just a percent to 7-point scale conversion but also provide a curve. Many institutions do not provide spreadsheets with built-in conversion formulas, leaving it up to the teacher.

What in part makes the Chilean point system odd –although it’s a 7-point system– it really isn’t marked as having seven intervals because one can’t give a student a grade below 1, despite his or her performance. It’s thought that if they show up to class, as infrequently as this may be and as uncooperative as they may be, they at least deserve a “1″. In the case that they don’t come to class –depending on how far the institution has commercialized itself– it’s either the teacher’s fault (for not motivating the student, despite the limited influence teachers hold) which disallows giving a failing mark or –if the institute is of an academic standard– the student may be removed from the class roster. Either case demonstrates that a “0″ is never given –but this is getting off topic again. Back to the point at hand, the Chilean system forces one to think in unusual fractions. What’s a 5.6? And how is a 5.6 different from a 5.7? Is this difference significant? And to ultimately come to the point of this article, how does one convert from percent to the 7-point system?