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In the first question, students are being giving ground rules by the example itself which are then violated by the grading standard. The original source author communicates to the reader the protagonist's realization that rustlers were trespassing with a literal "Rustlers!" instead of "She realized it must be rustlers", thereby establishing that "Rustlers!" represents and expresses the idea that the character realized it must be rustlers. Indeed, correct reading comprehension on the part of the test taker REQUIRES the acceptance that "Rustlers!" contains "she realized it must be rustlers" to even continue in the exercise. Any test taker accepting this rule and proceeding to write "Rustlers!" in the provided answer space is likewise intending to express the idea that she realized it must be rustlers with the prepackaged linguistic label they were given by the testing authority itself. Students answering "Rustlers!" aren't trying to claim that the protagonist was actually being struck by rustlers, they're trying to express the presented idea with the presented language, which seems, superficially, to the damned objective.
Not only is the given problem not well prepared, the grading guideline is ambiguous. There is an an unmarked difference between writing "Rustlers!" (full quotes) and simply writing rustlers. One carries on in the immediate tradition conditionally accepted by the reader, that she realized it must be rustlers whereas the other only allows the misinterpretation that the test taker believes that rustlers were striking the protagonist.
All of this could have been avoided by simply representing the question: "In the above text appears the phrase "Then it hit her". In your own words, explain what the author means by this." As presented, the standard is asinine in its petty requirement for verbosity.
The error of the second problem compounds that of the first by demanding that which was previously denied. It reduces the exercise to a game of word-finding in a test which otherwise punishes such a procedure. Heaven help the poor student who overthinks this apparently shallow exercise for something like a logic problem and attempts to appease the testing gods with a modus ponens argument (if A, then B; if Austin, then Texas), or assumes that state test graders can be expected to know that Austin is in Texas (who is testing whom).
Again, the grading guideline is poorly conceived, as it presents the grader with an incredibly badly-written ambiguity: "Do not accept reference to both Austin and Texas without indicating that Texas is the state, e.g. Austin, Texas". "Without" in formal logic, means "and not", and is a type of conjunction which can be broken down into two different terms using distribution in predicate calculus: "Do not accept reference to both Austin and Texas"; "And do not accept Austin without indicating that Texas is the state". "e.g. Austin, Texas" is the given example (e.g., exempli gratia, the 'given example') of...something, either what is acceptable ("do not accept...without) or what is not ("do not accept").
The third problem is the worst. Not only is it really just a game of word-find, but it wants the test taker to pretend that it's not. "How can you tell that Innis was familiar with the area". Well, because it plainly says so; "Innis knew this ground", which is just another way of saying that he was familiar with it. Is the test asking the reader if "familiar" is a synonym for "known"? It would first seem to the test taker that this test (supposed, of reading comprehension) is asking to construct an argument for why Innis could be said to be familiar with the island based on extracts which don't expressly say so. "Showing, not telling" being a good writing standard, the reader will probably reread the excerpt over and over looking for Innis to navigate the terrain with pause, to take trail forks without hesitation, or even easily pass foliage to access hidden pathways. But, No! The test actually wants the test taker to just point to where the text clearly the thing for which the question asks.
This is the literary equivalent of that meme in which a student, taking a geometry test, is tasked with finding the hypotenuse of a pictured triangle and the student simply draws an arrow to where the hypotenuse would be found in the graphic, captioned "here it is". When done in the context of a mathematics test, the student know this is inherently incorrect and I'm sure that the student taking this test in THIS context probably thought 'no, wait...this can't really be it'.
If today's students are performing poorly, it's BECAUSE of educrats, not despite them. To suddenly believe that the educational bureaucracy is right and that it is the students who are off requires some real cognitive dissonance. "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong."