<p>Forgive me if this is a repeat, but this article in yesterday’s USAToday is facinating:</p>
<p>College students struggle on history test
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<p>What prompted me to start the thread were these observations:
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<p>Take the quiz to see how you’d do if you have time. I missed two (darn it).</p>
<p>Here’s the link: <a href=“http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-09-17-history-test_N.htm?csp=34[/url]”>http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-09-17-history-test_N.htm?csp=34</a></p>
<p>I know that history/civic knowledge is my weakest area. I do much better analyzing and drawing conclusions after studying history than recalling specific dates or battles. Then again, my high school put more emphasis on writing and thinking than memorization–even in areas where rote memorization can be a positive thing.</p>
<p>My college has a civilizations requirement that I’m planning on fulfilling twice (or even three times if I have time) because it is an area I feel weak in.</p>
<p>Thank you, corranged, I forgot to pos the link. I’m a dunce. :D</p>
<p>I missed 6, most in the economic section. Serves me right for never taking economics!</p>
<p>Wow. It’s hard to believe that only one kid, at Harvard, scored 60, and that the average at Harvard and Yale was in the high 30s. I got 60 (not to brag . . . too much), it took 10 minutes, and there was only one question that I felt I was guessing a bit on.</p>
<p>Granted, the economics questions would be hard if you had never taken an intro economics course. But the history . . . I haven’t studied that stuff since high school.</p>
<p>48 (80%), with lots of guessing (never took ec 101). I dunno, alot of detail (Marbury v. Madison?). I suspect a similarly detailed quiz from any discipline would yield same results - or worse (e.g. physics). I doubt Dr. Bunting would fare well were I to quiz him about genetics. One person’s “useful knowlege” is another’s minutiae.</p>
<p>Yes, I think it’s questionable whether everyone should know all of this stuff to be a good citizen, and it’s even more questionable that colleges should be responsible for improving their students’ scores. (That said, I note the University of Chicago wasn’t in the sample. Based on what I know about the content of its Core, and the amount of economics in the air there, I would be sad if student scores there didn’t improve freshman to senior year. A lot of the political philosophy stuff is dead-center for what they do.)</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone has to hang his head in shame for not being conversant with Edward Burke, or not knowing which decade universal suffrage was adopted.</p>
<p>But, still, it isn’t a very hard test for someone interested in history and politics, and Lord knows there are a lot of kids like that running around the Halls of Ivy (including some who are math, science, or literature majors). Anyone who took AP US History recently – and how many of our kids didn’t? – ought to be getting 50% right as a bare minimum. I thought it was less fussy (and a little easier) than the test the same people used last year for the same media campaign. I would have thought the averages at Good Colleges would be higher, and the averages at The Rest are pretty awful.</p>
<p>I’m ambivalent on the test, too. I would have thought a decent liberal arts education would have at least provided enough history to push most folks into C territory, even with the interesting twists many universities are putting on history courses these days. </p>
<p>I do agree that this particular test is quite a bit more than the standard I’d expect for basic cultural literacy. I wonder how well I’d do on a comparable test on American/English literature, for instance. Well, outside Science Fiction, of course.</p>
<p>Oh, and I missed one of the economics questions, and I have a degree in economics. I could write a 30 page paper on why their answer was wrong…</p>
<p>Unfortunately history – along with geography & diagraming sentences – is starting to fall off the academic radar in elementary and secondary education. Oh, yes, many kids take AP history, but that doesn’t make up for years of neglect of history. </p>
<p>In my high school days, history was always taught by athletic coaches. No offense to coaches, but these guys were not the brightest crayons in the box. I vividly remember one class on Vietnam war. The coach – I mean the teacher (on crutches no less) – mixed up the British and the French as the colonial power in Vietnam. Finally some surfer guy, a complete pot head (think Sean Penn in Fast Times @ Ridgemont High) raised his hand and said “uhhhh – dude – I thought it was the French in Vietnam, not the British.” The teacher waved his hand as if it were a minor detail and said "yea, that’s what I meant, anyway… " and just kept on talking. A stoned surfer correcting the teacher’s facts: that was a first for me.</p>
<p>Yikes…I got a 49…Most of the ones I missed were the economics ones, and I did take Econ in college! 
(I think it might be the effects of excessive alcohol consumption Freshman year).</p>
<p>Haha, I got 37 right, and didn’t even know about 70% of those questions, as I don’t like history.</p>
<p>Strick11:</p>
<p>Which economics question? Which answer was more correct? I’m curious, because for the most part I thought the “wrong” answers tended to be pretty absurd, even if the “right” ones weren’t always completely right. It is a classic multiple-choice test that way – as much a test of test-taking skills as of actual knowledge.</p>
<p>Actually, I am a little disappointed that there’s no literary/artistic culture that they deem important to citizenship. I would think an educated American citizen ought to know something about, say, Whitman, Twain, Emerson, Dickinson, Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway, Ellison, Morrison. And the blues and jazz, rock, soul and hip-hop. And Abstract Expressionism, and movies. That’s America to a lot of the world, the part they love even when they’re hating on us. We ought to know what our strengths are.</p>
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<p>Actually, my favorite history teacher was also the the 9th grade football coach. Good man. Pronounced bourgeois “boar-ge-zee”. I probably learned much more from my own reading of the subject than he taught (isn’t that always the case), but he was a good man. </p>
<p>JHS, I think it was the question related to the economic justification for defense spending. It didn’t really matter which answer was “right”. You know, ask four economists a question and you’ll get five answers? I really did write a four page essay in answer to a true-false question once…</p>
<p>Throw in Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and I’ll second your literary literacy list.</p>
<p>I think that question was looking for an understanding of the term “public good”. I remember thinking that the “right” answer was phrased in a particularly clumsy manner, but that it was the only answer that addressed what the term means. If I remember correctly it shouldn’t take 30 pages to explain what was wrong about that “right” answer, but you would have a job convincing me that one of the other answers was better.</p>
<p>88.33, but then again I’m an old (very old) history major. I did some of the stuff they teach in classrooms. Messed up on the economics stuff.</p>
<p>Didn’t say you’d agree with the 30 pages, JHS, only that I could write them. After all, what else is a bachelor’s degree in economics good for?</p>
<p>And the first principle of economics is never say in one page what you could say in 30. See John Maynard Keynes.</p>
<p>I got a 55, one or two I should have known. I never took economics, but I only got one econ question wrong. Marbury vs. Mayberry got me, though I know I’ve heard my kids talk about it, also the just war question and the one about not knowing what you know - at least it sounded like a Rummy saying to me. Since the last history course I took was in 1977 and the last US history course was in 1971, I think 91% is pretty good. :)</p>
<p>I got 50 correct. I’ve never had an economics course and certainly am not up on the various political authors.</p>
<p>Just last night I was telling my son about Marbury v. Madison!</p>
<p>59 out of 60.</p>
<p>I haven’t finished the test yet, but I would quibble about some of the wording in their questions regarding political history and political philosophy. But then, that’s what my BA is in…</p>