US Officials Flunk Test On Civic Knowledge 334
A test on civic knowledge given to elected officials proved that they are slightly less knowledgeable than the uninformed people who voted them into office. Elected officials scored a 44 percent while ordinary citizens managed an amazing 49 percent on the 33 questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. "It is disturbing enough that the general public failed ISI's civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of elected officials, you have to be concerned," said Josiah Bunting, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board at ISI. The three branches of government aren't the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria?
I'd care more (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'd care more (Score:5, Informative)
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I really hope that wasn't the test in question - there's very few questions there that shouldn't be obvious; just from random pop culture you should be able to get more than half. If I had spent any time learning American history (which I probably would have if I was American), I would assume it would have been even easier.
Re:I'd care more (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2008/additional_finding.html [americanci...teracy.org]
Re:I'd care more (Score:5, Interesting)
Each question has between 4 and 5 options, some questions, like 19, show elected officials at about 10%.
That means if they picked a random answer, they would be correct twice as often.
I'll conceed that it wasn't the easiest question there, and I can understand low scores, but.... seriously?
Re:I'd care more (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong answers to questions on central planning vs. free markets, however, are due to a devotion to a philosophy that is just wrong. I'm sure those elected officials were shocked that they got that one incorrect.
So yes, you would expect that no group could do worse than 25% when given 4 choices, but when the questions are chosen with misconceptions in mind, it becomes far more likely.
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A lot of this stuff is not really civic knowledge, though. For example, while philosophy did play a role contributing to the thought processes that led to the founding of our government, it has little bearing on understanding the way governments actually work....
Also, #33 appears to have no correct answer. A. is wrong; the deficit is zero, but the debt may still be substantive. B. is wrong because printing money causes inflation if less money is taken out of circulation by being destroyed than is being p
Re:I'd care more (Score:4, Informative)
Reread what I said. The word you're looking for is capita, not person. Those do NOT mean the same thing in proper English. Doing something per person means that you did something for each literal human being. Doing something per capita means that you did on average something per person.
The term "capita" refers to an equivalence class of population units in which all people are treated as being equivalent even if the literal individuals that make up the population are not equivalent. Therefore, when you say we spend $1,000 per capita, it means you spend $1,000 on average per person.
By contrast, the term "person" refers to a flesh and blood object. When you say we spend $1,000 per person, you might stretch that terminology to mean that you spent $1,000 per capita. However, a precise interpretation of that phrase is that you spent exactly $1,000 on each person. I'm sure you can understand that those two statements are completely different in their meaning.
Here's an example. I encounter ten homeless people on the side of the road asking for money. If I give $1,000 to one person and nothing else to the other nine people standing there, I gave out $100 per capita within that population of ten people. I'm sure you won't argue that I gave out $100 per person, however. The people who got nothing would beg to disagree with you, as they did not get $100. Okay, after they beat up the tenth guy, they might, but....
The problem is that using the phrase "per person" is ambiguous. It can be interpreted in two different ways---the way you interpreted that statement (as a sloppy way of saying "per capita") and the way I interpreted it (as a logical fallacy that if you spent population * k dollars on a group, this implies you spent k dollars on each member of that group).
Saying "per capita", by contrast, is deliberately unambiguous and can only mean "per average person". There's a reason that people talking about financial matters always say "per capita" and not "per person". To people who are used to precise meanings of terminology like "person" versus "capita", the meaning of those two phrases is completely different. I'm not at all surprised that a lot of people missed that question because by a literal interpretation of the phrase "per person", the "correct" answer is incorrect.
Worse, depending on how you interpret the question, answer A. can also be correct. The question did not specify a time period. If you define the time period of the question to be from the creation of the government up until the present, and if the amount of income equals the amount of money spent during that time period, the debt is provably zero. So by one interpretation, D. is correct, by another interpretation, A. is correct, and by a third interpretation, neither is correct....
See why I object to this question now? Writing good, unambiguous test questions is really hard. This test was pretty well written for the most part, but that question was a real stinker. :-)
Only one free-market question on whole test (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong answers to questions on central planning vs. free markets, however, are due to a devotion to a philosophy that is just wrong.
There was only one question on the whole test that solicited an answer that favored free markets over central planning. There was another question that appeared to favor government action to solve the "free rider" or "tragedy of the commons" problem that is commonly cited as a defect of unregulated free enterprise. And there was another question that was backed up by Keynesi
Re:I'd care more (Score:5, Funny)
See when asked what a free market was the politicians kept looking for the box that said "where you get things for free from helping a business expand their market"
Or when asked why free markets secure more prosperity then government central planing they kept looking for "Because you are free to go work for a business in the market after you help it through central planing"
Or why a levee is a public good they were looking for "cause whats good for my contractor buddy with a no bid contract is good for the public"
Re:I'd care more (Score:5, Interesting)
Haha, you think most Americans care about their own history. That's cute. You really have no idea how stupid people can be around here. They're fat, dumb, and happy thinking they know everything and actually knowing nothing.
Where I live, a rural area of Ohio, people are generally Republican because they are ignorant of the outside world and have knee-jerk emotional reactions to anything that contradicts their personal values or way of life (abortion, gay marrige, oil, Iraq, etc). People in larger urban areas are generally Democratic and have knee-jerk emotional reactions to the BS spewed by the media every day. (global warming, Iraq, etc).
To be fair, where they live affects their perception of the world. Being in rural areas you stay isolated, so everyone around you generally shares your values, religion, etc. There is usually no noticable pollution (other than the occasional manure smell :-), employment rates are higher because manufacturing companies like to locate in rural areas to keep labor costs down, etc. In cities, you have an overwhelming amount of pollution to people who aren't used to it (ie me), jobless rates are higher because cost of living keeps wages high which causes companies to outsource and automate more. You see more foriegners and foriegn ways, or generally just people and things with values different from your own.
The bottom line is, the majority of this country is full of morons who don't think things through. Even if they think they do, but are really just going on crap they heard somewhere and never bothered to scrutinize or verify it for themselves.
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I hope it's not, too. It has very little to do with civics. What is Sputnik? What's the definition of business profit? A lot of these questions are from Business Economics 101 and have absolutely nothing to do with civics.
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Taking the test, I have to say that I think they may have gotten confused, what with high school teaching one semester of economics and one semester of government these days. Otherwise, why would I need to define "profit"? :P
I got 31/33. Missed the questions on Puritans and Stephen Douglas. A few of them have fairly loaded options that made it trivial to guess the right one, I probably guessed at another 3-4.
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Seems to be a pretty strange one to get wrong. Don't Americans have a 'budget night' where the government lays out of the table how taxpayer money will be spent for the next financial period?
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I have not taken a history course since my last one in high school ten years ago. I have no particular interest in history. I got 31 right. That the voters and officials are doing so badly is a good sign that something has gone wrong with both our education system and our democracy.
Re:I'd care more (Score:4, Insightful)
Because this "test" is a bit of right-wing propaganda, which seeks to conflate conservative doctrine with actual facts about our government. (Or is there an answer to "Free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than government's centralized planning because:" or "International trade and specialization most often lead to which of the following?" hidden somewhere in the Constitution that I've missed?)
The "Intercollegiate Studies Institute" evolved out of William Bennett's Madison Center for Educational Affairs and Irving Kristol's Institute for Educational Affairs [mediatransparency.org].
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Sure. All those centrally planned economies that have historically been so prosperous give the lie to the very idea that free markets are the best way to go.
What, there aren't any? Oops...
Sorry, but you fail. No one on the American Left who might actually get elected into office favors a centrally planned economy. Since the US does in fact use a free-market economy, it's important that it be properly understood. Nowhere did this test claim to be solely about government.
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Sorry, no.
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You mean the planned economy that starved tens of millions, and collapsed under its own weight only 40 years after WWII ended, surviving in the meantime only because of a black market and barter system? Yes, I call that a failure.
I'm afraid it's not at all clear that FDR's policies di
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"You answered 15 out of 33 correctly â" 45.45 %"
and I'm not even American or interested in becoming American, just filled it because I was curious.
I don't know what to say except that this kind of test should be passed by anyone reading about American history for a couple of days.
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I got an 84.85%
I missed the following:
Question #7 - D. Gettysburg Address
Question #8 - C. appoint additional Supreme Court justices who shared his views
Question #13 - E. certain permanent moral and political truths are accessible to human reason
Question #30 - C. decreasing taxes and increasing spending
Question #33 - D. tax per person equals government spending per person
Considering that I have a terrible memory and most of the things on that quiz I haven't thought about in over a decade I find it unacceptab
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I missed 4 questions.
Question #4 - B. Would slavery be allowed to expand to new territories?
Question #11 - A. their arguments helped lead to the adoption of the Bill of Rights
Question #13 - E. certain permanent moral and political truths are accessible to human reason
Question #33 - D. tax per person equals government spending per person
Strangely, I specifically remember selecting the right answer to questions 4 and 11 but I guess I failed at making sure the mark was in the appropriate place so maybe my scor
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#33 I misread debt for deficit and so chose the wrong answer.
#30 I missed due to apparent philosophical differences. I don't think increasing GOVERNMENT spending is a good way to stimulate the economy.
#7 I missed because my historical speech/document memory is incredibly horrible.
#13 for the same reason as #7. I simply have a difficult time equating people with their statements/speeches unless I've just recently been exposed to them.
#8 I missed because I had never read anything about it and was under the im
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You should really look into #8 a little. It's really interesting.
There weren't any justices up for appointment at that time. Roosevelt and congress was going to create positions for more justices and stack them just so if all the regular justices said "unconstitutional", the other ones could override them. This is what eventually led to the expansion of the interstate commerce clause in which the government seems to use to extend it's reach further then any sane reading of the constitution allows.
As for the
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If taxes equal government spending, then:
A. government debt is zero
B. printing money no longer causes inflation
C. government is not helping anybody
D. tax per person equals government spending per person
E. tax loopholes and special-interest spending are absent
Umm, wtf? Where is None of the Above?
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You have to read the answer to the question. If taxes were equal to spending, you could divide the the taxes by every citizen and get the same answer as spending for every citizen.
Lets say there are 10 citizens and $100 total collected in taxes and that government spending equaled the same $100. Now you could have two people paying $5 in taxes with two paying $15 and the rest ten but for the total collected, you would divide the $100 collected by the 10 people to get $10 per person collected. If you look at
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If that is the test, than I as a non-American just got 70%.
Re:I'd care more (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're going to give them a hard time about that, you probably shouldn't confuse the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. :)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep. I'm an Aussie who answered 29 out of 33 correctly, 87.88%, without trying too hard.
One of the kids here (14yrs old) got 100%. Smug little bastard.
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Ugh, I only got 69%, there was one set of answers I got wrong because I misread them, but the fact is if I didn't have a definite answer then there's still something wrong.
I don't know how I really compare, though. I'm a high school dropout who missed nearly 2/3rds of her elementary attendance (and they allowed me to because I was in an 'emotionally disabled' class) and I started in a community college a year ago.
I got the same as you (Score:2, Interesting)
81.something%
The thing is, I'm Canadian and everything I know about U.S. civics comes from television and places like Slashdot.
Actually, whats embarassing is, I probably know more about the U.S. than I do about Canada in these areas. Sigh!
Any link to the test? (Score:2)
Would like to see how stupid they (the politicians) are.
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I scored 90.91% (30/33). One of them I was braindead and should have gotten correct, two I was guessing on. Regardless, that is still an A, and roughly twice what my elected representatives scored in aggregate.
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Same. Including the braindead question...
Question #7 - D. Gettysburg Address
Question #8 - C. appoint additional Supreme Court justices who shared his views
Question #17 - D. manmade satellite
Not sure how I got 17 wrong... I thought the right answer, and managed to click the wrong option...
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33) If taxes equal government spending, then:
A. government debt is zero
B. printing money no longer causes inflation
C. government is not helping anybody
D. [mean] tax per person equals [mean] government spending per person
E. tax loopholes and special-interest spending are absent
There, fixed that for you.
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Braindeaded the alst one. I didn't read A close enough and selected it without reading the rest. I wonder if the /. effect can change online quizzes, since the monthly average is now up to 77% ?
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Hmm...guess that kills my chances of ever being elected to any office.
Where's the test? (Score:2)
Re:Where's the test? (Score:5, Informative)
Google is your friend....
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/resources/quiz.aspx [americanci...teracy.org]
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Hopefully their November results will now be biased significant upwards. :-) I can't be too smug though, as I only got an 84.4%. I'm a biologist, not an economist!
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To be fair, some of the questions are "history", and not "civics".
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That wasn't too hard. I'm not even American, I really don't care about politics, economics or social sciences and I scored 70%.
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So I took the test and scored 90.91% (30/33)
And I'm Canadian.
The 3 I missed...
I had no idea what Roosevelt threatened to do to the supreme court when they declared parts of the New Deal were unconstitutional. I didn't know what particular rights the first amendment gives. And I missed the one about the Scopes "Monkey Trial", which I'm not sure how I got wrong. I think I misread the correct answer as something to do with teaching evolution in private schools.
Of course, I got a few right that I made educated
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Me too!
The 3 I missed.... #7, thought it was much earlier; #10, knew it wasn't A, guessed one of the others; and #33.
33 is an interesting one. I chose "debt", though I knew it was wrong, but felt it was "more right" than any of the others. Deficit would have been 100% correct, no question. I dispute the correct answer, because it is open to interpretation. I took it to mean "is spending on me exactly what I pay in taxes", which is obviously cor
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The key to that question would be to think about what he would have been allowed to do: three of the four choices require powers the President doesn't constitutionally possess.
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The key to that question would be to think about what he would have been allowed to do: three of the four choices require powers the President doesn't constitutionally possess.
That's precisely what stumped me. I didn't think he constitutionally possessed the ability to expand the size of the supreme court at will either.
For me that left impeaching them... and I operated on the theory, that everyone is a criminal if you looked hard enough. So while I didn't think there were likely any legitimate grounds for
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He doesn't have the power to create new seats. However, congress was stacked behind him and went along with what he said. That's why the Supreme court backed up on their rulling and expanded the interstate commerce clause which is partially to blame for most of the problems in America today with the over reaching laws and such.
That is also why the democrat politicians are so worried about stacking the supreme court with ideologs. They know that it can be used to allow their somewhat unconstitutional policie
Re:Where's the test? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of the questions initially appear esoteric, but then I realized the way the questions are designed, it's not so much a test of if you know the actual historical event, but if you can, based on your civic knowledge, reason out the correct answer.
Huh? The questions were remarkably straightforward. They were not trick questions. They were not cases of multiple 'right answers and one best answer'. They were not multivalued : a,b,c then d is a and b types. They did not generally have deliberately misleading questions or answers. There were a couple that were slightly tricky... like the last question might trip you up if you don't know the difference between a debt and deficit, but seriously... you SHOULD.
It's not really a fair test for the general public.
I'm curious to see what you think a fairer test would be?
If questions on the same topics were asked in a more straightforward manner, you would get higher scores.
How could they be more generally straightforward?
I don't think many people could get 100% on it without at least a college education.
I think that says more about the american education system than the test. But seriously, the fact that the general public didn't get 100% isn't really the issue... the issue is that elected officials on average, FAILED it.
Its multiple choice with ~4 answers per question. A big enough collection of monkeys doing it randomly should score an average of 25%.
Plus, like most simple multiple choice tests, at least 2 of the answers can be easily eliminated with basic reasoning as being off topic or otherwise clearly wrong, reducing most questions to a 50/50 shot even if you don't have strong knowledge of the topic. So getting 50% on this test should pretty much be a freebie. If you know even a little bit, you should score >50%. And the average should probably be up in the 70's, at least.
I don't think you need college to get 100%, a high school education should be sufficient. But I will agree that the people who didn't go to college include the people who didn't do well in high school, so going to college would definitely be a predictor for higher scores.
Constitutional Correction (Score:2, Insightful)
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In other words the U.S.A has finally become an Idiocracy.
Experience (Score:2)
Politicians often argue that people shouldn't get involved in elected office because of lack of experience, though lack of knowledge or judgment doesn't seem to be an issue.
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Speaking of that, I would like to know what specific leaders like Obama, Hillary, McCain, Palin, Biden, Pelsoi and Reed had scored. I think it would be interesting to see if the people put their trust in the right places based on knowledge.
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Only in capitalism, and socialism, and like, anythingism.
Misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
To make an accurate judgment, we really need to see the test, questions about economics for example can be largely opinion/philosophy based rather than factual. Though failing to correctly answer opponents in WWII is either blatant stupidity, or willful ignorance, a child raised by wolves could answer that 2 days after being 'rescued'.
Its also important to consider who might consider themselves elected officials. For example doesn't the US also elect local sheriffs?
Key Caveat (Score:5, Insightful)
the key caveat with this news item is that, when you RTFA, you find that they are culling the results from "self-identified elected officials." So, anyone could take the test and, for a laugh, identify themselves as an elected official.
In other words, it is not the case that the organizers of this test randomly selected a cross section of the populace, got complete demographic information about them (including occupation) then had them take the test.
See also self-selection [wikipedia.org] and selection bias [wikipedia.org].
I feel stupid. (Score:2)
Quiz is here... [americanci...teracy.org]
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Wuss. I got 100% and I graduated 27 years ago.
That being said, some of the questions were a bit "questionable", vaguely worded, and/or open to interpretation. Still, a well-educated person should have been able to get at least 75%.
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same here, missed 4
That includes purposely missing one i read the answer to here before trying :) I tried to guess what i would have guessed ...
Kinda misread the last one :(
I don't really care what Socrates, etc believed ....
Not sure why i missed the one on Puritans, guess the right answer just seemed too obvious, hehe.
Have to agree that the fail rate is pretty pathetic as half of those are easy to guess if you had any education. If anyone missed the one about the New Deal they should be failed also since t
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Well, don't feel too stupid. The guys at Yahoo misspelled "American" in their title, leaving out the "c".
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Question 33: You're thinking of deficit, not debt.
Question 6: Read the damn amendment.
Not that great (Score:2)
I answered 25 out of 33 correctly; 75.76 %
Damnit! I'll never be an elected official!
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I got 31/33. I notice the "monthly average" was 75%, I wonder if it's all from slashdot people taking the test just now :)
Nerds kick ass at taking tests. It would skew the average.
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Small Sample Size (Score:2)
It's a big no-no to take a sample and then reveal statistics on a sub-population without first making sure that the sub-population size is big enough for its results to be statistically significant. The elected officials should have been polled separately to ensure there are enough of them in the sample.
2,500 people is more than enough, but I'm guessing that fewer than 1% of randomly-chosen people qualify as "elected officials." Far fewer. Even if the sample had 25 elected officials, I wouldn't give much we
33 out of 33 right for me... (Score:2)
not bad considering that my last goverment/civics/poli sci class was 25 years ago.
It's not a great test (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, yeah, people should know the three branches of government and who has the power to declare war. On the other hand, a lot of questions and answers are very vague or misleading. Some examples:
Q: If taxes equal government spending, then:
A: tax per person equals government spending per person
This question tests your grasp of logic or algebra, not civics. For the record, another option is "government debt is zero." This is incorrect because it's the deficit that's zero, not the debt. It's designed to confuse. A knowledgeable person could get this question wrong merely by being careless.
Q: Free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than governmentâ(TM)s centralized planning because:
A: the price system utilizes more local knowledge of means and ends
This is not the answer I would have given in a non-multiple choice test. I picked it because it was better than the other options.
Q: Free enterprise or capitalism exists insofar as:
A: individual citizens create, exchange, and control goods and resources
This is just phrased poorly. Why not be clear and ask "What is the definition of capitalism?"
Anyway, of course people should be doing better on this than they are. But it's still a crappy test. And for the record, the "officials" cited aren't exactly Barack Obama and John McCain; they're poll respondents who indicated that they have held elected office at one point. That could include your local dogcatcher, the chairman of your condo association, the head of your PTA, etc.
So don't be too alarmed.
My Guess (Score:3, Interesting)
is that this is related to the attack on 'elitism', which has turned into an attack on the elite. There are a lot of stupid people, and a lot of smart people, but people (typically neo-Republicans) conflate elitism (being a dick in the fashion of 'i'm better than you') to being elite (in general, suceeding at life, often because/with education).
This selects against people who suceed at life, or people who look like they have suceeded at life. Because 'they can't relate to me' is more important than understanding a number of economic theories, or the culture of an enemy nation.
My (slightly) partisan guess, but I wouldn't be suprised.
Proof (Score:2)
Question #7 - D. Gettysburg Address Question #33 - D. tax per person equals government s
On the other hand... (Score:2)
Results from a Brit... (Score:2)
I'm not even American, and I know little of the details of the US Constitution, Declaration of Independence, US case law, and political systems, yet I got 20 correct out of the 33 (about 60%), so I'm astounded to read that US citizens on average did worse.
One thing I noticed on the results page though was "Average score for this quiz during November: 77.4%".
So, while I don't know what the average for US citizens in the figures for this month (and all time) was, it suggests that results reported in the story
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Or perhaps that since the results were made public and reported on, smarter people, the people who read the news relatively currently, have actively looked for and taken the quiz. People who like to take little quizzes like this do it because scoring higher probably makes them feel a little better about themselves. Uninformed people probably don't seek out things that will, in all likelyhood, make them feel dumb.
Semantics (Score:5, Insightful)
Forty percent of respondents, meanwhile, incorrectly believed that the US president has the power to declare war, while 54 percent correctly answered that that power rests with Congress.
But police actions, anti terrorism actions and a broadly, ill defined war on a noun like "terror" or "drugs" are all fair game.
Splitting hairs, they're different to "declaring war." In practice, they're all ways presidents have ensured they can declare quagmires, I mean wars, without actually needing to stop and ask congress.
It's kind of like asking a child, "Did your brother hit you?"
Crying, "Yes!"
Brother, "Ha! I only kicked you. You're wrong!"
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You're right...I think that's that's precisely why people should be educated on who exactly can declare war according to the Constitution. So that they can call out the things you listed as the bullshit power grabs that they are.
Are these civics? Or is this a push poll? (Score:5, Insightful)
For what it's worth, I took the test [americanci...teracy.org] just now and got 100%, but I find a few things about it questionable: First, there are several questions that I'm not sure really fall under the definition civics. Second, several of the questions are of a theoretical rather than factual nature and I got the distinct impression that the test makers were pushing a specific (libertarian/conservative) ideological agenda. Maybe my impression was incorrect; I haven't had a chance to look up the group yet.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines civics [merriam-webster.com] as, "a social science dealing with the rights and duties of citizens." Most of the questions deal with the structure of our government and the history of that structure, so they can reasonably be said to fall within civics. But consider the following questions:
Number 13 is a question of philosophy (or, if you like, history mostly far preceding US history). Questions 25, 27, 30, and 31 are questions of economics. I suppose you could include economics as part of civics, because it's important to governance, but on that rationale you could start including all sorts of things, like statistics. Also, the answers to the questions are largely theoretical in nature. While there may be a consensus view amongst economists, they don't really admit clear empirical answers due to the complexity of disentangling the various influences in macroeconomics. On the topic of how best to stimulate economic activity, there are various different schools of thought that advocate different approaches and have enjoyed popularity at different times.
The other point was more a vague feeling I got that the questions were pushing an agenda. The survey picks out "religion" as one of the constitutional rights, rather than "freedom of religion". It asks for the attribution of the phrase "wall of separation" between church and state, and highlighting that this is not from the constitution (even though it is from one of the framers) is a favorite past-time of those who advocate a larger role for Christianity in government. Questions 27 and 31 praise free trade criticize centralized economies. And answering one of the questions "correctly" points out that federal disaster aid is not guarantied by the constitution (relevant to disagreements over the aftermath of hurricane Katrina). It's not really pronounced and may be just coincidence, but I'm curious if anyone else got this feeling. I'll have to look up ISI and see if I've guessed correctly. In any case, it occurred to me that you could use the press release to get the general public to take it and use it as a push poll, stating your opinions as the "correct answer" or selecting factual information in such a way as to give the appearance for support of your argument.
Re:Are these civics? Or is this a push poll? (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, I got a chance to look at the ISI website, and it is, indeed, a politically conservative organization as I was able to guess from the content of their quiz. One portion of the site is hawking a book about "American Intellectual Conservatism" [isi.org] . Also looking at the mission statement [isi.org] is instructive.
It isn't clear to me whether this is an attempt at a sort of "push polling" as I was speculating or whether they're honestly trying to test what they see as the "important" part of civics, which is strongly colored by their world view. It's probably best to assume the latter. However, if they're not testing based on a wide consensus view of what's important in civics but rather based upon their particular ideological slant then they're not exactly testing peoples' knowledge of civics in a fair sense.
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I took the quiz and got that too, especially that question about why free markets result in a better economy than planned economies. Any moron should be able to recognize the giant assumption in that question.
It's a lousy test for Civics (Score:2)
Too many of the questions are random historical trivia rather than testing understanding of the knowledge of the structure of the United States Government and Economy.
Interestingly, other than a couple of questions on the Supreme Court the test is devoid of questions on the Judicial system. Nothing about trial rights, jury service, criminal rights, etc.
I would have classified many of the questions as History questions, not Civics questions. And even them, some of them are sufficiently obscure and/or incon
Missing Question... (Score:3, Funny)
1. FUD Campaign.
2. Diebold VOTE-RIGHT(tm) automatic voting machine.
3. Be married to indiscreet high office holder and then publicly declare you still love him.
4. Legally change name to "None of the Above"
Question 33... (Score:2)
The answer page says "D" is the correct answer. I answered "A".
This is a little perplexing to me, since D would imply that every person pays the same amount of tax, say $5000, and therefore the Gov't would spend $5000 per person.
However, the poo
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The answer page says "D" is the correct answer. I answered "A".
Its probably the trickiest question on the whole test, but D is the correct answer.
This is a little perplexing to me, since D would imply that every person pays the same amount of tax, say $5000, and therefore the Gov't would spend $5000 per person.
It implies no such thing.
"per person" is equivalent to "per head" or in latin "per capita"
Anything measured "per person" or "per capita" represents the total amount divided by the total number of peop
And you wonder how we elect these idiots (Score:3, Interesting)
Bush, Obama, William Jefferson (even while under indictment), Stevens, Clinton, etc.
The populace gave the Democrats in Congress a victory, kicking out lots of Republicans in this whole "change" mantra, yet it's shown that 43% of Obama voters didn't know the Democrats were in charge in the first place. Only 17% knew Obama won his first election by having his opponents removed from the ballot.
We are, in aggregate, dumb and completely uninformed. We will therefore get commensurate-quality representatives in government.
Uneducated title of TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd be more interested in reading TFA if its title correctly spelled the word "American". I find it amusing that alleged professional journalists, who produce an article describing the alleged ignorance of Americans and American politicians, can't even manage to correctly spell the nationality of their subjects IN THE TITLE nor proofread it before it goes to press on an internationally available Web site.
Where's the credibility? Journalists are part of that same cross-section of (American) idiots.
Re:So that's what explains it... (Score:5, Insightful)
George Bush getting elected twice.
No, but it does explain why he got the PATRIOT act and PATRIOT II acts passed by congress.
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Apparently you didn't watch the movies too carefully either, since there were more than 2 countries that the US was fighting.
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Russia never actively supported Germany, they just acted in self-interest on Poland and signed a non-aggression pact. While Allied relationships with Russia were frosty, they were not considered an enemy during the war. The closest we came to being enemies during WW2 was in competition for land and scientists as the war drew to a close.
Oh, and as long as everyone else is posting scores, 96.97%. I missed #4, having guessed wrong between the two answers I considered possible given my flaky memory of elemen
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No, he is responsible for protecting the space-time continuum. Read the Constitution!
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That doesn't mean he doesn't understand the Constitution; it means he can't count. ; )
Re:Biden is a perfect example (Score:5, Informative)
Article I. Section 2:
The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.
Article II merely describes how the Vice President is chosen and the conditions under which the VP may become President (later superseded by Amendment XXV).
Re:Biden is a perfect example (Score:5, Insightful)
Biden is saying that Article 1 defines the role of the vice president of the United States, and that that role is part of the Executive Branch. The VP gets to break ties in the Senate so that the Executive branch can check and balance the powers of Senate.
Keep in mind that Cheney is pushing the idea that the Vice President is NOT a part of the Executive (while the President is) only so he can avoid federal disclosure laws. Cheney wants to advance the power of the unitary executive by co-opting in part the power of the legislative branch of government. It's pretty scary stuff.
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This was changed when Aaron Burr (who was nominated with the intention that he become Vice President) received the same number of Electoral College votes as Thomas Jefferson (nominated
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http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/interview-with-john-ziegler-on-zogby.html [fivethirtyeight.com]