Monday, July 4, 2011

Civic Literacy Quiz

My friend Mike Marnell asked me to take the civic literacy quiz on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute website at http://www.isi.org/quiz.aspx?q=FE5C3B47-9675-41E0-9CF3-072BB31E2692&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1. I got 100%; give it a try. According to ISI:

  • ISI has surveyed over 28,000 undergraduates from over 80 separate colleges, and the average score on our basic 60-question civic literacy exam was about a 54%, an “F.”
  • At elite schools like Yale, Cornell, Princeton, Duke, Georgetown, and Johns Hopkins, their freshmen did better than their seniors on the same test, what ISI dubs “negative learning.”
  • Among adults, those with a college degree also failed on average ISI's civic literacy test, scoring little higher than their peers with a high school diploma.
  • College-educated adults were particularly ignorant of the Founding and Civil War eras, constitutional themes, and the essential features of a market economy.

2 comments:

Mairi said...

OOOps! I got four wrong.......only 87.88%. Time to brush up, I've been away from school too long. LOL!

Mitchell Langbert said...

That's great, Mairi.