Results of 'basic civics' test can be misleading
GREG BEAN

Coda The national papers and pundits were all atwitter last week over the results of a test given to 14,000 college students across the country that seemed to suggest that lots of them got stupider during their four years of expensive education instead of smarter.

The test, the results of which were released by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, was what they characterized as a "basic civics" quiz of 60 questions covering American history, government, international relations and market economy.

The test was given to freshmen and seniors in 25 of what were termed "elite" schools like Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Duke and Berkeley, and 25 other run-of-the-mill four-year colleges.

At first blush, the results seemed astonishing.

Nationwide, nearly every school tested averaged an "F." Nationally, the average score was 50 percent correct answers for freshmen and 54 percent for seniors.

At the so-called elite schools, freshmen routinely scored higher than seniors, suggesting that students on those prestigious campuses actually lost knowledge on those subjects during their four-year education. Nationally, no college scored higher than an average of 69 percent.

Newspaper writers and columnists had a field day with the information.

A writer for the Home News Tribune, which covers Middlesex County, for example, led his story with one of the multiple choice questions and suggested that if you answered with one of the four incorrect choices, "you might be Rutgers material."

That sarcastic approach was about par for the course, but the thing I noticed was that in none of the stories written about the results did any of the writers admit taking the test themselves.

In the interest of full disclosure before shooting my mouth off anymore, I'll admit to being the victim of both a four-year degree program and a master's program at one of those also-ran colleges. My bachelor's degree was in American literature and my master's was in English literature, with a specialization in 17th-century "cavalier" poetry and Jacobean City Comedy. Not once in the many decades since graduated have I had practical use for much (or any) of the knowledge I absorbed in those programs. Fact is, the subjects of Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and Robert Herrick have not come up a single time in conversation, polite or otherwise, over the course of my entire adult, professional life. At cocktail parties and backyard barbecues, I keep waiting for someone to bring those writers up, but they never do. It's been frustrating.

Still, there were a couple of years in my graduate school days when I was forced to remember a ton of esoteric information about those guys, including what they liked to eat for breakfast.

The minute I got my degree, I wiped almost all those facts from the hard-drive of my brain so I'd have room for more important stuff, like the odds of filling an outside vs. an inside straight and the angles necessary for a double-bank shot in a game of eight ball.

In the years since, I've come to realize that the most important thing I learned in college was not the construction of Hudibrastic rhyme, but self-discipline.

Even so, I thought I could probably do better on the test than 50 percent, so took it and had six of the smartest adult people I know take it with me.

Of our group, one scored 87 percent, one got 85 percent (our resident geniuses), one scored 80 percent, three scored 74 and one scored 69 (I won't say which of us did best, but it wasn't me), apparently making us smarter than nearly every college senior in the nation.

I suppose we could gloat over our results,

let out a few triumphant neener,

neener, neeners, but it might help to add a little perspective.

First, while there were a lot of important questions on that test - like which form of government our Constitution establishes and what rights are considered unalienable in the Declaration of Independence - there were a lot of others typical of the trick questions devised by certain vicious and eggheaded professors of my acquaintance. Do you know, for example, whether the Declaration of Independence relied more on Plato, Machiavelli, David Hume, John Locke or George Hegel? Or whether Edmund Burke thought society consists of a union of past, present and future generations?

You might know those answers, and God bless you if you do. But to me, it seems like some of the questions fall into the category of stuff you have to remember to pass an exam, but forget as soon as you fill in the last blank because there's no practical reason to remember it.

Just for starters, a more practical "basic civics" test might have asked a question about how a law is made, or what powers the Supreme Court really has, or what idiot thought up the Electoral College and what it would take to get rid of it and elect our presidents by popular vote.

That's why - instead of demanding a refund on the $100,000 or more we paid out for our kid's four-year education - we ought to take the results of this test with a grain of salt. See it as an interesting factoid, and not a disturbing indication of the general dumbing of America.

A better indication of that might be the depressingly low results of national basic literacy and geography tests. The trends in those areas are miserable enough to give a parent a case of the shivering fantods. Not only couldn't a lot of our students find their location on a road map, they couldn't read the map even if they picked the right continent as a starting point.

And here's a serious question about all this. How did the professors at all those colleges do on the test? How did the high school teachers who prepared those college freshmen do? How did all those writers and columnists who made such a big deal of the test results and used them to make fun of our educational system make out?

I just suspect the answers to those questions would be grist for a great column. Agree?

If you're interested, you can take the test yourself at www.nysun.com/article/62993. Don't cheat, and if you get better than 85 percent, just keep it to yourself. Nobody likes a smarty-pants.

Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at gbean@gmnews.com.