BOE Quiz, Units #1-5

Welcome to Tasty Grammar's first-ever quiz. Let me walk you through the "game play," which should be simple enough.

1. You can enter your name or not. It's optional. Nothing about this quiz is recorded anywhere, so you can take and retake it an infinite number of times. Whatever your final score is is known only to you unless you make it public somehow. No one else has to know anything.
2. Taking the quiz is just a matter of checking (or not checking) the correct check boxes. So take the quiz at your leisure. You can add pressure by timing yourself. If you'd like for there to be a timed option built into the quiz itself (say, 30 seconds per question for a total of 2.5 minutes for the whole quiz), that can be arranged.
3. After you finish the quiz, click the "submit" button to submit your answers.
4. You will immediately receive a percentage, a fractional score out of 5.00 (because there are five questions), and a letter grade based on the standards I lived through as a student in Fairfax County, Virginia (see my intro post for those standards) in the 1980s.
5. You will also see a "show incorrect answers" button, which will immediately highlight—in garish red—the answers you got wrong. The quiz's title will tell you which sections of Bad Online English to review so you can retake the quiz and do better next time.
6. You will also see "download PDF snapshot" and "skip PDF" buttons. If you want a snapshot of your quiz, click "download." You'll get a PDF right away.
7. No matter which button you click, "download" or "skip," another button will appear: "reset." Click it, and a new quiz with different questions—but about the same content—will appear. And the cycle will begin again. I almost forgot: clicking your browser's "refresh" button will also reset the quiz, erasing your answers and giving you a new quiz with different questions.

Remarks:

• In theory, the quiz shouldn't repeat itself exactly for a long time. It has several degrees of randomization (randomized question order, randomized answer order, randomized selection of similar questions from a pool). You might see a previously done question reappear when you hit "reset," but it's highly improbable that you'll see all five questions again the next time around, with answers all in the same sequence.
• If anything about the above instructions is unclear, or if something procedurally confusing happens while you're taking the quiz, let me know in a comment. There are doubtless kinks that need to be hammered out. This quiz is a "first draft."
• If you dispute the correct answer to a quiz question (grade grubber!), this could be because of a mistake on my part, or it could be that I'd intentionally written the question that way but got my facts wrong. Again, please let me know with a comment. But if you're going to argue that a question is wrong, please quote evidence from a good online authority (link it!) to back up your claim. I won't accept correction from someone who doesn't provide evidence, but if I'm proven wrong, I'm only too happy to make changes, which may have to happen to both the quiz and the original lesson.
• A note to people doing these quizzes on their phones: hold your phone horizontally, or you'll miss certain spacing/hard-return issues that could be relevant to the question you're answering.

How to use the quiz as a learning tool:

1. Finish the quiz, look at your score/grade, then hit the "show incorrect answers" button.
2. Review your answers. Ask yourself what might've gone wrong. Each question is reflective of a rule or principle taught in the relevant BOE (Bad Online English) units.
3. Hit "Download PDF snapshot" so you have a copy of your quiz answers + which questions you got wrong. For whatever ChatGPT-ish reason, the PDF gives you both a plain-text rendering of your quiz plus a screen-capture-style image of your quiz. Print and/or save.
4. Look over the relevant units (each quiz's title contains the names of the relevant units) and try to find the principle underlying the question you got wrong. Study and re-study that principle.
5. Take the quiz again. It ought to be at least a little different this time. If not, hit "refresh" on your browser. There should ideally be different questions, in a different order, but they'll be about the same topics.
6. Repeat this process until you start getting "A+"es. Then move on to the next quiz (whenever that one comes out).
7. Don't cheat. This quiz, despite being designed to minimize cheating, is fallible like all quizzes and tests. It can be gamed. But why would you game the quiz? What purpose would it serve except to promote the lie that you got good at the relevant topics when, in reality, you're still making the same dumb mistakes because you didn't internalize the rule?
8. Instead of cheating, get good. For some of you, this will be easy. For others, it'll be harder. But you're under no pressure to tell anyone anything about your progress unless you're infinitely proud of your most recent score or compulsively confessional even when you fail.

These quiz instructions will not be repeated for future quizzes, but depending on what comments I get from users, they may be modified for clarity. The quizzes themselves may end up modified as well, as explained above. And feel free to suggest other testing methodologies. While the quizzes for BOE will remain in this multiple-choice style, the tests I make for the paid subscribers will include other types of questions ranging from matching to "write the correct sequence" to "fill in the blank." There will be no short-answer or essay questions because (1) I probably won't have time to grade them, and (2) I refuse to let AI grade your writing. You are, of course, always free to exercise your prose skills in the comment sections of all the posts (free or paid) that you see.

Good luck!