Teacher Discussion Forums

Hello,
I'm not sure if I can use the words "on / during / in" in the following sentence?
My classmate can't think for himself, “on / in / during” exams he just regurgitates everything the teacher said.

The word 'in' and 'during' are fine, but 'on' sounds odd to me.

fluffyhamster wrote:The word 'in' and 'during' are fine, but 'on' sounds odd to me.

Surely you mean "in" sounds odd to you? In exams...?

Well, I don't see this use of 'in' as much of a stretch from its locational meaning (A: Where's Tom? B: In/Taking his French exam), and the "location" can be pretty much the "time" also.

fluffyhamster wrote:Well, I don't see this use of 'in' as much of a stretch from its locational meaning (A: Where's Tom? B: In/Taking his French exam), and the "location" can be pretty much the "time" also.

Really? I have to admit your new sentence sounds a little better than the original, but even then, I wouldn't say it. Is this a Britishism? If so, the posters question could boil down to a difference in dialect.

Hmm. I can say, "He always has trouble on exams." "What did you get on the exam?" but "He got tired during the exam." I don't think I can use "in".

thank you for taking the time to answer my question

'In exams' has seven entries in the COCA, compared to 13 for 'during exams', so it's a perfectly viable alternative.

'on exams' is exceptionally common in American English, but rare in British English.

Stephen Jones wrote:'In exams' has seven entries in the COCA, compared to 13 for 'during exams', so it's a perfectly viable alternative.

'on exams' is exceptionally common in American English, but rare in British English.

Is "on exams" as rare in British English as "in exams" is rare in American English?

But 'in exams' isn't exactly rare in AmE (if one agrees that the 13 instances in the COCA of 'during exams' is a comparatively frequent usage); that is, it is over 50% as frequent (that 7:13 ratio) as 'during exams', according to the COCA.

Anyway, you can join up for free and search both the COCA and BNC courtesy of BYU (Brigham Young Uni). It's been a while since I've really used 'em (I've forgotten my password, should rejoin!), so I'm not quite sure how one would for example select sentence-initial 'For' from all the other 'for' (to allude to your other thread), but I gave Heath a few general search tips (mainly on how to sequentially select the pop-up POS/tagset codes) a while ago:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 1753#41753

The plural of 'corpus' by the way is apparently 'corpora', but 'corpuses' does the job too, eh!

as far as time is concerned, I think that this sentence resembles the situation in these two sentences : "He always comes on time" and "He always comes in time"?

What can we say in this case?

Hi Azamouri. I think the similarity between your two sentences is mainly superificial (i.e. a matter of surface form only) - with regards to their actual meaning, 'be/come on time' simply means "punctual", but 'be/come (just) in time' means "not late; with enough time to be able to do something" and is thus often followed by 'for something/to do something'.

That is, if you say 'He is always on time', nobody will really say 'For what, exactly?', but if you say only 'He was (just) in time' almost everybody will then question 'For or to do what?'!
http://www.oxfordadvancedlearnersdictio ... onary/time (see entry 4, and the Idioms section's 'in time (for something/to do something)' entry).
http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/time_1 (see entries 28 and 21)

The differences in meaning between each of the 'exam' sentences on the other hand are much smaller i.e. the difference in preposition won't ultimately make a whole lot of real difference to a listener (although Americans and British people may, as we have seen in the responses above, have differing preferences for what the default preposition "should" be).