Sentence Correction

Received a PM asking me to respond.

The problem with the 1000 stuff is that it is inconsistent. Some of it is perfectly fine - even good, actually. And some of it is terrible.

Basically, someone created it by typing up a bunch of questions from a bunch of different sources. Some of those questions are the old paper-and-pencil official tests, which means the questions are real questions. (They're also copied illegally, so I also don't like 1000 series stuff for that reason.) Some are from other, not so good sources.

And then a not-insignificant number of the questions have been transcribed improperly. Typos were made. Sometimes, the typos are obvious. When they're obvious, you know you can ignnore (sic) them. But sometimes the typo is a bad typo - eg, introducing a grammar error into the correct SC answer. Or giving the official answer as B when the official answer was really C.

When that happens, people think the questions are right, so they think they must be doing something wrong. And then they spend time memorizing the grammar error in the correct SC answer as a "good" rule when it's totally wrong. Or they memorize whatever wrong answer B said because they think it was the right answer.

I have dealt with this multiple times (as has Ron, apparently, from the mention above) when people ask me to comment on a question and I take a look and realize that the question itself is flawed. That has happened enough times with 1000 questions that I have decided that I (a) don't like the source, (b) wouldn't study from it myself and (c) won't even discuss problems from that source anymore because I think it's so unreliable.