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Results in VFR civics survey
(Note: this post has been revised with adjusted figures as of 9 a.m., 11/24.) Out of 126 VFR readers (including myself) who submitted their score on the ISI test of civics knowledge, the average score was 30.49 correct answers out of 33 questions, or 92.4 percent. As best I could determine, the 126 included six non-Americans and eight women (none of whom are foreign). The average score for women is 30.25, or 91.7 percent. The average score for non-Americans is 30.83, or 93.4 percent. I personally told each of the non-Americans how impressed I was by his high score. The mean score in the randomly selected sample of 2,508 telephone respondents last spring, discussed here, was 49 percent correct; among college educators it was 55 percent. The most recent score among people administering the quiz to themselves online is 77 correct percent for November, a figure that is of no scientific value as the sample is self-selected. Ditto the VFR score of 92.4 percent. (For example, we don’t know how many VFR readers took the quiz but didn’t submit their scores.) Also, unlike the random national sample who took the test on the phone, those who take the test on the Web can look at and ponder the questions on their computer screen. I think that my score might have been lower if I had had to answer the questions on the phone; more likely, I would have had to ask the test giver so many times to re-read the possible answers that the quiz would have taken an hour. By the same token, if the randomly selected 2,508 respondents last spring had been able to read the test, they would have done substantially better. To give a complicated multiple choice question on the phone—a test, moreover, with many tricky questions and unconventional use of language for the subjects being discussed—is ridiculous. I also have to say that I was fascinated by the emotional investment many respondents had in their score on this informal and inconsequential test, now much they were bothered by their wrong answers, or by the test’s correct answers which they felt were wrong. I will post some of these e-mails (anonymously). I do not place myself above others in this regard. All the way through junior high school and high school, my life was one long run of tests, and, even today, when I take a test, particularly a multiple choice test, a kind of biological imperative seems to take me over demanding that I excel. I think that that instinct is in a lot of us. There are also many interesting issues regarding the difficulty, ease, fairness, appropriateness, logic, correctness, and incorrectness of the test questions, and I’ll be posting more on that as well.
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