> If you live in the US, I agree that you must use American English.
Why though? I think you missed my point with the rationale for this. See below.
> But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
That makes perfect sense though? The point wasn't "act American because you're in America", the point was "they're trying to teach you to communicate with {whatever audience they believe you will most often find yourself needing to cater to in the future}". Obviously in Europe they deem that to be British-English speakers. In America it'd obviously be American-English. etc.
As a computer science student in England we were told we should use ‘program’ rather than ‘programme’ since that was the convention in our subject.
If I remember correctly BBC Basic accepted COLOUR as well as COLOR keywords to be more approachable to primary school children who were native English speakers.
Why though? I think you missed my point with the rationale for this. See below.
> But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
That makes perfect sense though? The point wasn't "act American because you're in America", the point was "they're trying to teach you to communicate with {whatever audience they believe you will most often find yourself needing to cater to in the future}". Obviously in Europe they deem that to be British-English speakers. In America it'd obviously be American-English. etc.