"US officials flunk test of Amerian history, economics, civics screams an AFP headline that I picked up while perusing Yahoo. Obviously unsurprising given the recently popular Sarah Palin show, but who knew the rot went so deep?
Average score of the 164 respondents who claimed to have held an elected public office at least once in their life: 44%. Ouch.
Average score of the other 2344 private citizens: 49%. Double Ouch. One order of Education Reform, and make it speedy, garçon.
Quoth the chairman of the group that gave the test:
"It is disturbing enough that the general public failed ISI's civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of elected officials, you have to be concerned," said Josiah Bunting, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board at ISI.
Seriously. Politicians would be failing even on a curve. And who made this test up? What is wrong with this picture? Why am I not surprised?
Answers (and correct ones, I promise) after the jump.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute conducted this study. The ISI is a non-partisan non-profit educational organization, and they have a slew of interesting programs on their website (and probably in person). They created a 33-question quiz that examines a person's knowledge of the core principles and important events of America.
It boggles my mind that so many people can manage to miss 16-17 relatively simple multiple choice guess questions (such as: "Business profit is defined as:" or "A progressive tax is:"; for both those examples, only half the respondents answered correctly). Each answer has 4 possible choices; that means that the score you could get by guessing is 25%. How can people be so ignorant or misinformed about important parts of the fabric of America? Well, at least I know why roughly half of Americans can vote for Republicans, and I wish I could have said that statement with sarcasm. Questions on the Declaration of Independence, MLK's "I Have a Dream Speech," The Commander-in-Chief and 1st Amendment Rights got the highest scores (but still never more than about 80%!!), while (admittedly esoteric) questions on The Puritans, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, The Separation of Church and State and Free Markets got less than 20% correct answers. Disgusting, no?
I encourage everyone to take the test (NO CHEATING!) and see how well they do. Forget "Are You Smarter than a 3rd Grader?" We should have Jeff Foxworthy Sarah Palin host "Are You Smarter than an Elected Official?"
For more in-depth trends, as well as a breakdown of how well people and politicians did on each question, click here! Also, if you want to see the press release (and not regurgitated releases of the press), you'll have to slog through a PDF.
Full Disclosure:
I scored a 31 out of 33. I missed questions 4 and 7. (My Bad).
What did you get? I want to see your scores in the comments.