Smarter than a Harvard Senior?

[matgb]

Um, I don't know how to react to this. paulatpingu asks So how much do you know about American civic history?

On this quiz I scored 66%, which would place me in one of the top three American Universities when the same quiz was carried out there. Basically, even though I know very little about the specifics of US history, my general knowledge on the subject is better than most American college students.

The quiz itself is here at American Civic Literacy, my result?

You answered 47 out of 60 correctly — 78.33 %

Now, admittedly, some of the questions are about political theorists (Plato and Locke, for example), which both of us studied as undergrads. But, um, it's mostly about United States history and governance. From the breakdown of results by US college (they tested students in the Senior year):

1. Harvard University 69.56%

I, a Brit, score better in a test of US history, than the average senior at Harvard, the premier US university? And despite temptation, no googling, no look ups, just general knowledge and educated guesses.

I know there are smart, capable, switched on USians out there--a chunk of them are on my friends list. But seriously, if even the most educated know so little about their own history and system of government...

My brain hurts. Take the test, can you beat a Harvard senior?

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Catching up, thanks for all the supportive comments during my travels yesterday, brain is now slowly waking back up

Comments

[matgb]

It was the financial ones that helped me up I think, all the reading about economics I've been doing gave me a solid grounding, that and I've studied all the theorists, including the Federalist Papers.

The UK is now bringing in 'citizenship' lessons, we've not had them before recently, and the lack of knowledge of the average person is at times palpable--I had planned at one point to be a history teacher, how that translated to IT marketing is another thing entirely.

The thing that bothers me is that the US makes such a big thing about the citizen-democracy thing, so to find such ignorance at such a high level disturbs me. We've always just muddles through, ignorance is still seen by some as a virtue, but we're getting better. Ah well.

[liz-marcs.livejournal.com]

Well, just to add to the higher-scorers here, RL had an impact on what questions I answered correctly — I'm an ex-reporter that dealt primarily with politics and crime, so it makes sense that I would be familiar with the government and governmental theory questions.

I'm also a history nut who lives in the Boston area and was educated at Boston University, so, duh, I better know early American history otherwise I'm in big trouble.

As I've no interest in economic and never worked as a business reporter, it kind of makes sense that my knowledge of economics is weak in comparison with the stuff I actually do know.