This Started as a Spelling Post, But the Hyphen Error is Better

This comes from one of those Indian news services that pilfers content and reproduces it without attribution (they have done this to our Encarta columns), so we don't know if the punctuation errors are original or added. At any rate:

Gloucestershire, October 3:
A primary school in Gloucestershire, [sic] finally decides to do away with the teacher’s all time [sic] favorite - dictation or spelling tests, as [they are?] more commonly known, for the fear of instilling a sense of failure in the child incase [sic] he/she didn’t make it in the test. [Failed the test, perhaps? Or is the penalty for misspelling death?

Quoting the tests as "unnecessarily distressing" [this is a direct quote?] for the children, the Headmistress Debbie Marklove of the Whitminster Endowed Church of England Primary School, near Stroud, decided to do away with the whole process of learning words at home and reproducing them at school in the form of a test.

"Each school and each pupil has different needs and each school knows its own pupils best," she said. According to Debbie, the whole process left the children with a sense of failure when the words learnt by them at home were finally reproduced in the test wrongly spelt.

All the parents of the 105 odd [sic] students attending the school received a written message from the school in order to inform them about the school’s new policy, which banned all spelling tests.

It should be 105-odd students--otherwise, it's calling the students "odd" when they're merely sissies for falling to pieces over spelling exams.