what’s wrong with just asking for clarifications?

"Could they complain about it" - obviously, if you can (usefully) complain depends on the university. 10 years ago, in my university, there were profs who made it clear that their exams were unfair (e.g. more difficult to women) - nobody acted on complaints. A good instructor will of course hear your complaint and try to give you points for the answer/throw it away if nobody gets the world.

I think that you call it "devastating" for the student to fail an exam is not a good attitude. People fail exams all the time, they study more and try again. Sure, it takes more time but it's hardly "devastating". Also, I don't think it's worth to think about this a lot - there are likely 10^8 possible strange scenarios which could happen in exams - most will never happen, for the others, it's better to think about how to resolve them when they really come up.

I honestly don't see it as your responsibility to ensure people taking an exam are fully-conversant in the language in which it is set. Of course, you could quite easily replace this one with 14 days & avoid the issue entirely, but if it was car mechanics… they'd just have to know the translations; you can't cover them all.

Also I’m not aware of any American who has made it to the point they’re taking a chemistry class that doesn’t know what a fortnight is. If for no other reason just about every old time fantasy book is in love with the word

@GrantCurell - so everyone reads old time fantasy books? I don't, so I didn't know exactly what a fortnight was. I only had a vague idea that it was a time period of a few weeks.

@GrantCurell: just about every old time fantasy book is in love with the word – When fantasy literature is in love with a word, it’s usually because it’s just the right amount of outdated to evoke an archaic feeling but still be understood by the target audience consisting of native speakers. That’s actually a good argument against using the word.

Aren’t furlongs per fortnight still a thing that college students would have heard of?

@GrantCurell you are making the major assumption that current students still read books (never mind fantasy books). If we were taking about recent usage on TikTok maybe but reading books?

@ZeroTheHero English students might not read, but chemistry students? Almost certainly.

We exam-composers need to be far more aware of this general issue (assuming students' cultural context) than we are. I've seen math questions require detailed knowledge of the details of a baseball diamond, for example, which is by no means global knowledge. Imperial units is another one (why should someone outside the US know offhand how many feet are in a mile?). So good for the OP for asking, and we should all make it part of our practice not to use language that will cause this situation to arise in the first place.

I think perhaps people outside the UK are underestimating quite how common the word fortnight is. Virtually everyone who is literate and over the age of 16 knows what it means. I'm not suggesting that people from overseas should also automatically know it, but it's certainly not some exotic word that is uncommon.

First, I think you should always tell students to ask you clarifying questions. A definition of any term that is not part of the course would be fine to define. But mid-test I think that is really unfair. It is very important to think about audience. You may have students who are not only US-raised but some for whom English is their third or fourth language. I would say that "two weeks (14 days)" would be the way to put it to avoid confusion.

As usual, anything familiar to one person must be familiar to everyone else and if not, they're idiots. Fortnight is not a common word in the US, at least not with that spelling, and any reasonable test maker would use two weeks or 14 days instead.

@ZeroTheHero A word the student does not understand might not be the best example. A better example might be expressions that might be interpreted differently, I remember taking a test to see what type of English I speak. There were several expression different people understand differently. As example, some people understand "over the mountain" as on top of the mountain, while others understand it as on the other side of the mountain.

The Google search fortnight -fortnite site:gov suggests the word is not that unusual in the US.

While the overall thrust of the question is good, the specific example of "fortnight" seems ignorant of the combined popularity of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Roald Dahl. A better example might be "biscuit" or "to table a topic". Especially since those examples have clear, well-known, but distinct meanings on both sides of the pond. So a test taker wouldn’t even think to ask for clarity since they would think they understand when they don’t.

It may not be as popular as before, but I think people in the United States have heard about one of the most popular battle royale games in history! But I think the bigger problem is that the professor is encouraging students to play video games while they wait for their experiments to finish. Any experiment that can be finished in such a short time is something that they can afford to watch from start to finish, which builds good habits.

Related question: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/167438/…

Y'all are really over-fixated on "fortnight." The specific example is not really the point.

@Thierry If a British university student doesn't know the word fortnight, then they're not going to know the word week either, so saying "two weeks" wouldn't make anything any clearer.

Where do people get the idea that "fortnight" is British English? It's just English, and means the same in AmE as it does in BrE and AuE and all the other dialects of English, unlike "football" and "boot" and "vest" and "pants."