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Ontario's Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills. Almost a third of those students are failing.

"Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level," says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo University. "We would certainly like it to be a lot lower."

Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none. Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser University

One concern about IM has to do with the "bastardization" of language. Several articles indicate that students who use messaging on a frequent basis often use bad grammar, poor punctuation, and improper abbreviations in academic writing. According to Lee (2002), "teachers say that papers are being written with shortened words, improper capitalization and punctuation, and characters like &, $ and @. " However, something that is not always considered is that these mistakes are often unintentional – when students use IM frequently, they reach a saturation point where they no longer notice the IM lingo because they are so used to seeing it. Montana Hodgen, a 16-year old high school student in Montclair, New Jersey, "was so accustomed to instant-messaging abbreviations that she often read right past them" (Lee, 2002). As she puts it, "I was so used to reading what my friends wrote to me on Instant Messenger that I didn't even realize that there was something wrong," she said. She said her ability to separate formal and informal English declined the more she used instant messages" (Lee, 2002).

This was also a problem for Carl Sharp, whose 15-year old son's summer job application read "i want 2 b a counselor because i love 2 work with kids" (Friess, 2003), and English instructor Cindy Glover, who – while teaching undergraduate freshman composition in 2002 – "spent a lot of time unteaching Internet-speak. 'My students were trying to communicate fairly academic, scholarly thoughts, but some of them didn't seem to know it's "y-o-u," not "u"'" (Freiss, 2003.) These examples give credence to Montana Hodgen's point, that heavy IM use actually changes the way students read words on a page.