Posted on 09/18/2007 9:16:24 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
I got 95% and could kick myself for missing the three questions I did. I think overall the quiz was excellent and something like this should be required for citizenship.
Excellent thoughts. I agree that high school is the place to learn civics and history. My daughter went to a Christian high school and had a much better high-school education that I ever had. I had decent history classes which she also had, but she had much superior English Lit classes. I think that high schools should teach History and Civics a LOT more carefully.
The Left has no intension of teaching real American History and Civics, for to do so would be counterproductive to their revolutionary purpose--to subvert our culture of freedom and replace it with a communist state.
This revolution has been a long time coming--middle 19th century. When the people are disamred, they can complete (or try to) their plans.
The letter grading system is meaningless to evaluate this test. It all depends on how difficult the test was written. If the test was written to be very easy would you say that it is amazing that every college earned an A?
I have had many physics and engineering tests where *nobody* scored higher than 60% and where the class mean was 40%. This doesn't mean that the class didn't understand the physics. It was just that the test was written extremely hard. These kind of tests weed out the people who don't know anything in the subject. If you don't study hard for one of those tests you will score 10%, and since it was graded on a curve you will get hammered ruthlessly.
I have also had to write tests when I was operating nuclear reactors in the Navy so that we had some expected average score and some expected failure rate. If too few people (fully qualified nuclear operators) were failing then the tests were too easy and they needed to be rewritten If too many were failing then the tests were too hard. And if the command didn't pay attention to this fact then outside of ship monitoring would.
83.33% here
I bet the average FReeper would score higher than the average of any of the universities tested.
The civics and American history part is fine. But about 20 of the 60 questions were devoted to philosophy, microeconomics, and macroeconomics. You may think that these should be part of civics, but I don't think that is necessarily reasonable. I would certainly argue that philosophy and economics have had significant effects on how our government is shaped, but I would not think a citizen is lacking in his or her civic duties by knowing only American history and the design of our government. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't expect 75% of Americans have a clue who St Thomas Aquinas is or what Keynesian economics is. I would expect them to be able to describe the more significant cases the Supreme Court has heard, how the Constitution is structured, what the Declaration of Independence says, what the major political alliances that the US has participated in were, and how the different wars that we have participated in were started and concluded.
I am not one to argue that civics and history are being successfully taught in our schools. In one memorable exchange with a nuclear mechanic on my old submarine I asked him the rough dates of when the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, and World War II were fought. He got one right (I'll let you guess which one). Many of the dates he gave were off by more than a century. Sad. But he was still a good mechanic. These things were never taught to him in school and he never cared for them either way. But he could tell you how many turns per inch of lockwire you would need for some arbitrary sized nut or how to mechanically start up a turbine generator. If you think this is bad, most sailors I met couldn't tell me what happened at the Battle of Midway nor who Lord Nelson was! I should note that most of them had a decent knowledge in civics and history. There were some that were extremely knowledgeable in civics that could cite every battle in every war we fought, almost repeat lines of the Constitution verbatim, and describe the intricacies of many of the treaties we have signed (like SALT II). It is from talks with those sailors that I now know what I do about American history and the Constitution. But even they would have looked at me odd if I started asking who St. Thomas Aquinas or Alexis de Tocqueville was (except perhaps the officers who had courses in philosophy).
Considering your online moniker, you need to learn to link more...
Oh, I only missed the correct answer to #21. 59 others were correct.
#27 doesn’t belong on a “civic literacy” test.
The surprising thing is this - some school administrators are painting the result as POSITIVE. Even if you are ranked first or second in the test results, a D+ average for your students should not be cause for satisfaction.
See here (from the Pennsylvania area) :
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_528201.html
Grove City students shine in history knowledge
By Bill Zlatos
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
American college students as a group are as likely to flunk a basic history exam as pass it, but a study released Tuesday found those at Grove City College know more than most.
The study for the Washington, D.C.-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows the nations freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities scored an average of just more than 50 percent or an F on a basic American history test.
Among Pennsylvania schools, Grove City seniors ranked second nationally with 67.3 percent correct; the University of Pennsylvania, eighth, with 63.5 percent; and Carnegie Mellon University, 20th, with 56.9 percent.
Schools are not focusing much on civic literacy, concluded Ken Dautrich, a public policy professor at the University of Connecticut, who conducted the study. Theyre focusing more on math, science, specialization and business degrees.
Grove City is attracting students into their program that are already better informed on the civic education scale, he said.
William P. Anderson, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Grove City, said he was pleased by the results.
It shows our general education curriculum and the way we teach students history and political philosophy prepares them for citizenship, he said.
Students answered 60 questions on American politics, U.S. history, American economy and foreign relations.
Joe Trotter, head of the history department at Carnegie Mellon, attributed its low score to adding the history of women, blacks and other ethnic and racial groups to the curriculum.
The result of that is some of the things that we considered conventional knowledge has had to share a place with the knowledge that very few people knew anything about 30 years ago, he said.
The study showed that students attending Ivy League and other high-priced schools had some of the lowest scores. In addition, students across the nation showed little gain in their knowledge of history between their freshmen and senior years an average of 3.8 points.
Grove City seniors improved by 3.6 points, Carnegie Mellon by 2.8 points and Penn by 0.8 points.
Trotter said Carnegie Mellon is training undergraduates to become historians themselves. He said its students would have scored better if they had been tested on an expanded view of history.
Students at Grove City must take six courses or 18 credits on the history of civilization. Dautrich said freshmen there scored so high that they had less room to move up.
I got the chance to go to the Democratic Underground ( the left wing version of Free Republic ). Apparently a lot of them took the test as well. Not scoring very well compared to Freepers. See here for a glimpse :
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2995426
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