Posted on 09/19/2007 9:27:58 AM PDT by WinOne4TheGipper
WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- Harvard, even though it scored the highest, was among elite U.S. colleges where students proved dismal in their knowledge of civics and history, a report said.
The non-profit Intercollegiate Studies Institute analyzed scores of a test given to 14,419 freshmen and seniors at 50 U.S. colleges last fall, USA Today reported Tuesday.
Overall, the freshmen tested averaged 50.4 percent on a civic literacy test, while the seniors tested averaged 54.2 percent.
Seniors tested at Harvard had the highest overall average at 69.6 percent, nearly 6 points higher than its freshmen but still a D-plus, said the ISI report.
A Harvard senior was the only student among the 14,419 tested to get 100 percent correct.
Yale had the highest scoring freshman at 68.94 percent with freshmen at Princeton, Duke and Cornell also out scoring seniors who took the test, the report said.
William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told USA Today students have fewer civics requirements because the value of higher education more often is defined by knowledge of economics.
Me too! On one question ("We hold these truths ...") I just marked the wrong answer. And then I had three bad guesses, but probably a few good ones too.
ML/NJ
You answered 51 out of 60 correctly — 85.00 %
Average score for this quiz during September: 74.7%
Average score since September 18, 2007: 74.7%
Looks like Freepers are raising the average.
But I change 3 correct answerers to incorrect, which I always tell my son not to do.
I scored a 70% which I think isn't too bad considering my background. I made one of my employees take the test, a college freshman taking American History, and she scored about a 15%....tsk tsk....
“I just viewed that as a logic question. You can’t know that you cannot know, unles you know THAT, making the proposition false.”
Now that you put it that way, it aligns perfectly with my version of that: You don’t know what you don’t know. It is a logic question and my mind was oriented for civics/history so it went right over my head. Thanks for the clarification.
The average when I took it was 73.7% and it was up to 74.7% when you took it. The FReepers that were taking it were scoring in the 90s and high 80s, and the average has moved up 1 percentage point. I think the DUmmies were offsetting the FReeper gains with their low scores.
You answered 57 out of 60 correctly — 95.00 %
Average score for this quiz during September: 74.9%
Average score since September 18, 2007: 74.9%
Answers to Your Missed Questions:
Question #26 - D. John Locke.
Question #36 - D. The authority of a legitimate sovereign.
Question #50 - A. the price system utilizes more local knowledge of means and ends.
Wow, you don’t have to be embarrassed. You did great.
I had to retake it to find out which ones I missed. Here are my original incorrect answers:
Question #19 - C. philosopher kings.
Question #36 - D. The authority of a legitimate sovereign.
Question #54 - D. can be reversed by government spending more than it taxes.
Question #58 - B. An increase in the volume of commercial bank loans.
Question #39- D. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
Question #53- B. a resident can benefit from it without directly paying for it.
I answered the last two correctly the second time around. With number 39, it was just a “duh!” moment that caused me to change it.
Some my incorrect answers are because I second-guessed myself. Some I got wrong because I was never exposed to the information.
Should I feel this disappointed in our future leaders?
Today I had to explain to a young E-4 that D-Day was during WWII.
I got a 93. My highest level of education was chef’s school. I had no college level history or civics courses. I read a bit, but only about a dozen of the questions had answers that I learned after high school. Much of it I learned in junior high. I’m not bragging. I’m commenting on what a sad state this country is in when the best educated college level students in the nation do so poorly on a test like this. Our form of government will not survive if our citizenry do not understand its basics.
Hmm, even after several beers and dinner I scored 90%. After being out of college for 32 years. I guess I got a little education in spite of all the good times.
Still, I thought even some of those where I got the “correct” answer were poorly worded. Something about a lot of the questions and answers rubbed me the wrong way.
I thought the same thing. Particularly on that question. I scored high partly because I was making the correct assumption about what they meant in some poorly worded answers.
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 nation’s 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. “They’re 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 fo 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
LOL!!! The DUmmies are calling the quiz: “a strong bias toward a traditional capitalist world-view.”
Even a passing review of 18th century history would touch on Hume and Locke. Their philosophical writings set into motion the revolutions that swept the world. Their philosophy leads back to this basic question and the answer of Rene Descartes: Cogito ergo sum.
I got 54/60, and you are right, this was a hard test. And that’s the way a good test should be in my opinion.
I done all of them and I only scored an 85%. Some of the questions were worded strangely and I screwed up when going from one to another on at least three and may have changed my answer.
another reason to home school.
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