Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe ADELAIDE, Australia, Oct. 28 (UPI) -- An Australian state where critics say that school officials have dumbed down the curriculum has given them more ammunition. In their final exam this week, students in their last year of high school in Victoria were asked to compare a typical e-mail message with a sentence from a love letter by the English poet John Keats, The Australian reported. The two passages were "how r u pls 4giv me I luv u Xerox, :-)", and, from Keats, "You fear, sometimes, I do not love you so much as you wish." Advertisement Other tasks on the exam were analyzing a Dilbert cartoon and writing a letter to a department store magazine. Kevin Donnelly, an education expert who recently prepared a report for the government on primary education, called the exam "unchallenging." "It's dumbing it down and the real concern there is that in trying to be accessible to such a wide variety of students, and in trying to not disadvantage those weaker students, I'd argue they're not really challenging the better-abled students," Donnelly said.
