Conjunction Junction, What's Your Dysfunction?

We administered an exam in our Grammar and Style class this morning. The results were. . . disheartening.

Now, we should mention that we allow students to refer to notes, books, tarot cards--whatever. we figure that the important is not so much whether the students have memorized everything but whether they can apply the information they've learned. So, y'know, the questions themselves should be relatively easy.

The first question--material we went over on the first day of the class--asked students to name the eight parts of speech and to give an example of each. A frustratingly small percentage of the class bothered to read the instructions, and thus gave only the parts of speech with no examples. One student, however, who did give examples answered as follows:

1. Adjective . Example: Beautifully (Well, wrong, but we could see where she was going.)
2. Preposition. No example given.
3. Verb. Example: Run (OK.)
4. Noun. Example: [Student gave her own name] (Hey, we're on a roll!)
5. Adverb. Example: Fastly (Yeah, OK, we know. But we gave her credit for at least having the general idea.)
6. Pronoun. Example: She (Good.)
7. Interjection: Example: Sadly (Huh? Well, maybe, as in: "Sadly, you failed the test." OK, no.)
And. . . .
8. Conjunction.
Example: Baseball.

?!?

"On your hamburger, would you like ketchup baseball mustard?"

"You're going to be in a lot of trouble baseball you don't do your homework!"

Thank God we let them use notes.