Long time ago I had a assignment which I had to convert a quoted speech to reported speech. Here's one of the question in my assignment:
"I'm going to quit school and get a job".
My reported speech answer:
Jessica announced that she was going to quit school and got a job.
However, according to my teacher, that was incorrect (but I didn't know where the grammar error was), while I thought that was correct. Any correction and suggestion?
"Get" is not a present-tense verb, but an infinitive governed by "going to". If it were a finite verb, the sentence would have to parse as "I [[am going to quit school] and [get a job]]", so the second half of the coordination is "I get a job", which is grammatical, but not meaningful in this context.
So, when it is put into reported speech, "get", not being a finite verb, is left unchanged.
Edited: it occurs to me that your version "Jessica announced that she was going to quit school and got a job" is perfectly grammatical, but has a different meaning. It parses as "Jessica [announced that she was going to quit school] and [got a job]"; i.e. it says that she did get a job, but not that she announced she was going to.
