Civics lesson

[james_davis_nicoll]

US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.

I got 33 of 33 questions right.

Take the test yourself

Nicked from autopope.

In unrelated news, Chinese man learns that real pandas are less cuddly than they look. Happily, aside from emotional damage the panda was unharmed.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I wonder how many people picked "Canada and Mexico" for the WWII question?

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

US vs. Canada & Mexico... that was WWI, wasn't it?

I got 33 right as well, so I feel comfortable saying that a high C (77.9% was the average score in Nov. when I checked it) is not really that bad; things could be worse. With that said, it was amusing to see how the politicians' scores tended to run below the nonpoliticians'.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I scored 32/33, but many of the economic questions are poorly phrased and/or assume a particular economic theory. I got most of those right by guessing what the test writers believed the right answer to be.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

I noticed that too. Keynes would have been proud.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

International trade and specialization most often lead to which of the following?
A. an increase in a nation’s productivity
B. a decrease in a nation’s economic growth in the long term
C. an increase in a nation’s import tariffs
D. a decrease in a nation’s standard of living

For the majority of countries, the answer has been (d). I suspect that isn't what the test is looking for, though…

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that one is an invitation to a fistfight!

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

I got 26/33, so average. I am not American.

[newsy891.livejournal.com]

30/33 here - all three of the ones I missed were economic questions, which is no surprise to me.

[j-larson.livejournal.com]

31/33 here. In both of the missed questions, I was able use my carefully cultivated test-taking skills to narrow my choices down to two, and then guessed.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

See, when I was not sure what they wanted, I eliminated the most incorrect answers until I had one left.

[barberio.livejournal.com]

31 out of 33. One because I misread how they meant 'Federal Government' in the context of the question, and one because I see paying federal taxes as paying directly for federal government projects, in much the same way paying to stay at a hotel is paying for the TV and shower in the hotel even tho those come packaged with lots of other stuff too.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

I think you misinterpreted the question: infrastructure is considered a public good because IF it were left to private citizens to fund it, those who opted out would still benefit from it. That's why the government steps in and forces everyone to contribute through taxes.

[ellemir.livejournal.com]

I'm in the UK and got 24/33 just under 73%. So what are these elected officials on?

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

I vote for anti-intellectualism and religion.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

I got a 32/33 due to the levee question. I narrowed it down to two answers, and chose the other, in my mind effectively identical, one.

I bet lots picked China and Russia for the WWII question, never mind that the USSR was an ally in that war.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

So was China. Or at least we were China's ally...

[thette.livejournal.com]

30/33, and US history/civics was a very small part of the high school history course I've taken. (Discovery, revolution, emigration, WWI, WWII, Cuban crisis, Korean war, Vietnam war. And the wars were special projects. I don't think we even mentioned the civil war.)

[avram]

I got the last one wrong, due to not really paying attention.

Question #25 (about "Free enterprise or capitalism") should have been split into two: Free enterprise exist so far as ... individual citizens create, exchange, and control goods and resources and Capitalism exists so far as ... government implements policies that favor businesses over consumers.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

31/33. I had to take a civics test to graduate high school, something that is not characteristic of all U.S. school districts. (Clearly.)

[pameladean]

29/33, but I didn't try to game it. Some questions seemed to have no right answer.

P.

[wizwom.livejournal.com]

no real hard questions, although a couple where there was a "proper" answer from a number of anecdotal possibilities.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

32 - I missed Lincoln-Douglas. (Technically 31, but that's because I clicked a different circle than I was aiming for once.)

[panzerwalt.livejournal.com]

30/33 for me

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

33 out of 33 here; I agree that a couple of the economic ones were a bit biased. Interaction with David Friedman online helped me with those.

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

I got 33 as well. Does that mean I am qualified to hold public office?

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

31/33,and I'm British. This story, if accurate, is staggering.

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

I know. It wasn't that hard, though I didn't expect to get 100% like I did because I know there are good reasons to argue with some of the choices that I made.

Puritans? Socrates?

[wdstarr.livejournal.com]

I got two wrong. One was just a brain fart, the other was one of the questions that had no place on a quiz about U.S. civics (the one about the Puritans. The one about Socrates, Aquinas, etc. was the other one that I think was really out of place).

Re: Puritans? Socrates?

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

I thought the philosophy one was fair, but then I had a minor concentration in philosophy in college.

[lauriemann.livejournal.com]

You answered 26 out of 33 correctly — 78.79 %

Not as good as I would have hoped, but there were at least two questions that were weirdly-worded and had correct answers I think are kind of dubious.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I missed one FDR question and one economics question, and as I went through the test, that was what I thought would happen. I'm not strong in economics, and for some reason the FDR years, just before I was born, are a big weakness in my history knowledge.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Oh, and on the FDR question the right answer was the one I was going to pick at first. I think I should learn from Trivial Pursuit: the first answer that pops into your head is likely the right one.

[poeticalpanther.livejournal.com]

29/33, UK-born Canadian. Oddly, the ones I missed were all in the early part (6, 7, 8 and 11, I think?): not enough known about American history for a couple of bits.

Probably half a dozen, though, I got right because of test clumsiness (three answers sound pat, one sounds complex, DUH). Not a good test of much.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Ugh. 28. I could not remember a thing about the Anti-Federalists. Also, I absolutely bombed the economic questions; I personally find multiple-choice tests to become confusing when the test writers make value judgments. Like the question about the levee, there were 2 choices that seemed to be basically the same to me, although in retrospect I realize that the phrase "directly pay for it" was key.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

31/33, but I got one wrong because I hit the wrong key. The one I really got wrong was the debt vs. deficit one. That was my fault - I was bored and didn't read all the options closely.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That question was actively misleading, though. The "correct" answer requires that you implicitly assume a mean over the whole population when calculating deficits and revenues "per person".