50% for me too. I guess that graduate seminar didn’t pay off — of course it was 8 years ago now.

by shaun—May 10, 08:12 AM

And here I thought it was because I haven’t yet read The Sound and the Fury, but I guess that’s not right…

by greg—May 10, 08:25 AM

58% for me. Damn machine. Damn Faulkner.

by kl—May 10, 08:35 AM

75% here. I really AM writing a final exam…

by mary—May 10, 11:42 AM

42%... but it’s been even longer than 8 years since i’ve read any faulkner…

then again, i think that they cheated by only picking the sound and the fury

by Balthasar Gracián—May 10, 09:22 PM

33%. I read the first 20 pages of S&F a few years ago, then the library asked for it back, and I never bothered to check it out again.

I’m guessing that Mary and I are the only ones to have differed statistically significant from chance, though we are in opposite directions.

by JH—May 11, 02:20 AM

the guy in our dept who thinks he’s brilliant got 58%. the guy who really is brilliant got 80something%.
i guessed that the ones capitalizing nouns were german, and the ones with lots of punctuation were faulkner, but then i didn’t bother to see if that strategy paid off by looking at individual quotations…

by mary—May 11, 08:57 AM

My own thesis was that most the ones ending in ellipses were Faulkner, as were those that actually seemed to have settings in MS or MA (the bridge one was a dead giveaway); those that seemed to have the completely wrong word somewhere were machines.

I didn’t analyze my errors to see where I went wrong…

by greg—May 11, 09:02 AM