This year's assessor's report from the Scottish Qualifications Authority exam board says that students who answer questions on William Shakespeare, Wilfred Owen or John Steinbeck using text message language can still get marks if their responses are right. They don't get any points for their use of English, but because the board uses "positive marking" (marks are added for what you get right, not deducted from a perfect score), the students are not actually being penalised.

England's Edexcel also confirms, despite its more vehement insistence that the use of text language is "absolutely not acceptable," that the content of a candidate's answer would still be considered.

Now, the exam boards don't know how many candidates are actually doing this - except that the number is very small. But conceivably a creative student might decide to explain that, "2 b or nt 2b, dat is da q" is Hamlet expressing his worries "abt lif atm".

And a time-pressed, paid-by-the-paper, exam marker would bother to decipher that and give them due credit? Come on! Summer is for teachers to top up their income while sitting in the garden with a beer, not unpick the densest of teenage slang that only reminds them that they're old.

Actually, it's not that implausible. The average teacher will have discovered in their first week that "real" language in education has long since given way to impenetrable, meaningless management-speak condensed into even more meaningless acronyms.

Scottish teachers have to wade through the SQA's waffle: the same assessor's report that highlighted the text messaging (non)-issue said that candidates did poorly, "where there was an inappropriate choice of text or task which limited candidates' ability to respond successfully in terms of the grade-related criteria for critical evaluation." (I can only guess that means, "candidate studied the wrong book" or "candidate answered the wrong question".)

But SQA definitely strides ahead of England and Wales' Department for Education and Skills. Try this gem on teaching 14 to 19-year-olds: "At a national level, we will set out what the entitlement is and the key roles, responsibilities and accountabilities among local partners for delivering it. We are also building capacity to deliver - among other things, that means making sure that we have the right buildings and the right teachers with the right skills, and that the funding system works well." (I have no idea what that passage means, but I do know that it would be awfully unfair to set it as a test of the reading comprehension of 16-year-olds.)

The beauty of text messaging is that it encourages you to make your point in 96 characters. There's no laziness involved - to condense a thought down to a minimum of simple, short words takes time, consideration, and a good grasp of standard English as well as its dialects.

There's a good chance that an examiner - sorry, assessment associate - who picks through a tangle of letters and numbers might find insight in a brief utterance on Of Mice and Men. A better shot, anyway, than any of us finding that in "Consultation on draft regulations setting out the process for setting statutory targets for local authorities under the Childcare Act 2006".