Are you smarter than a Harvard student? Probably...

God knows how reliable this sort of sillyness really is (not very, probably) but:

Students at many of the country's most prestigious colleges and universities are graduating with less knowledge of American history, government, and economics than they had as incoming freshmen, with Harvard University seniors scoring a "D+" average on a 60-question multiple-choice exam about civic literacy.

According to a report released yesterday by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the average college senior at the 50 colleges and universities polled did not earn a passing grade.

You can take the test yourself here. I confess I did so with much trepidation. It turns out that I don't know much about judicial review or how the bond market works. More embarrassingly I could do with revisiting just war theory. Still, 57/60 or 95% seems a satisfactory score for a foreigner. Leave your scores in the comments, if you dare...

Comments

[Jim Barnett]

I also got 95%. I'm a U.S. native, but have the excuse that I took the test while in a (long, rambling) meeting. I got the date of the Jamestown settlement and topic of the Lincoln Douglas debates wrong due to ignorance, but I'd blame the distraction of the meeting for my mistake on the Monroe Doctrine.

[Jim Barnett]

I also got 95%. I'm a U.S. native, but have the excuse that I took the test while in a (long, rambling) meeting. I got the date of the Jamestown settlement and topic of the Lincoln Douglas debates wrong due to ignorance, but I'd blame the distraction of the meeting for my mistake on the Monroe Doctrine.

[Chris]

Hey, 57/60! A lot better than I expected. I must have got lucky here and there.

I missed the just war question, the bond question, and chose debt instead of SS. I feel dumb for missing the last two, as I have an econ degree!

[Gabriel]

Just a guess, but it could be that seniors perform worse on this test because they have been focused primarily on a particular major, while students just out of high school will have a broader education fresh in their minds.

Or maybe it's brain cells depleted by alcohol bingeing.

[Sean]

Got 58/60 - and I'm a foreigner (albeit one who lived in the US for a few years). I don't understand how a US citizen can fail it!

[Simon Clark]

75% but I'm not even going to university until next year so... I win.

[Pseudonymph]

I was astonished to get 90% 54/60 and can only put this down to a half-forgotten Jurisprudence course 20 years ago, viewings of Roots, Gettysburg, Jefferson in Love plus an economist boyfriend who would not shut the fuck up about work.

[Kraut]

78.33% - failed a few which I should have known. Others I still don't get - maybe my English is not good enough? Most of the constitution history details are just that: details. But who am I, a techie from Old Europe...

[empiricus]

(59/60) I'm a 49 year old US native who is somewhat but not excessively embarrassed to have gotten the bond market question wrong (which doesn't seem that US-specific - Bank of England or ECB interventions ought to work the same on a technical level even if the political environments driving interventions are potentially different).

Given ISI's strongly paleo leanings, I was pleasantly surprised how relatively non-contentious the exam questions were (though q49 did conflate free markets and and capitalism).

I'd love to see some equivalent tests for other countries, to get some idea what is considered basic civic literacy for them (and learn the parts that I don't know - for example I know that I don't know much about how Australian or German federalism works operationally).

[Bruce Moomaw]

I blew the bond question -- and I have a BA in Political Science from the U. of California. As you can imagine, this has made my day...