What's Your Civics IQ?

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute did a survey of 14,000 college freshmen & seniors at 50 universities to test their knowledge of U.S. civics. The results were pretty dismal as the overall average score for seniors was a mere 54.2%. Even the elite schools in the sample had poor showings:

• Harvard 69.56%
• Yale 65.85%
• Brown 65.64%
• UVA 65.28%
• Penn 63.49%
• Duke 63.41%
• Princeton 61.9%
• Cornell 56.95%
• UC Berkeley 56.27%

I took the test and scored 86.67%. One of them was a boneheaded mistake (I read too quickly and mistook Andrew Johnson for Andrew Jackson). Most of the rest I missed were economics questions, a subject I never formally studied. I had narrowed down the choices to 2 and simply guessed wrong.

I find it very depressing that students who are supposed to be among the best and brightest in our country show such a dreadful lack of civic literacy. While a few of the questions struck me as a bit on the overly nit-picky side(when does Marbury vs. Madison come up aside from "Jeopardy" or the AP U.S. History exam?), the majority were things I would consider to demonstrate a basic understanding of our country's history and government.

(HT: Henry at "Why Homeschool")