Φ's score on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Civics Quiz was 59 of 60 questions answered correctly. Not too bad for a 2:00 AM bout of insomnia.
The quiz is multiple choice, For a few of the questions, it is possible to quibble over the "correct" answer; however, the alternatives among which the correct one is listed are indisputably wrong, so it should be easy to identify.
According to the Seattle Times:
ISI gave the test to students at a number of universities, offering money for volunteers to take it. The best average score, 69.56%, was at Harvard University. Next were Grove City College (67.26%) Washington & Lee U (66.98%) and Yale (65.85%). University of Washingon students scored at 55.88%, which was about in the middle. At the bottom were students at St. Thomas University in Florida, at 32.5%.
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The question I missed was, "What happens when the federal reserve buys bonds?" The answer I was looking for -- "The money supply increases" -- wasn't among the answers. The answer I selected -- "The money supply decreases" -- I didn't think was right, but was the only choice with the words "money supply" in it. The correct answer -- "Commercial banks can lend more money" -- is indeed a second or third order effect (after all, the U.S. Treasury must take the money from the sale of the bonds and spend it, after which it must be deposited in a commerical bank, increasing the banks cash reserves and therefore its lending capacity), but I couldn't think through the chain of causality at 2:00 a.m.
The correct answer to the question, "How does Keynesian economics decrease unemployment?" was "Spend more than it taxes." However, while this is no doubt the way Keynesianism is usually applied in practice, in theory Keynesian economics doesn't necessarily require deficit spending. It is only requires taxing and spending away such private savings as is not being invested in capital expenditures.
I had a few other quibbles. For instance, the correct answer to "What ended legal racial segregation in education?" was given as "Brown vs. Board of Education" instead of, say, "The U. S. Army", but here again, it was pretty obvious what they wanted.
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Ace
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3 comments:
I got a 95%, missing three. I can't BELIEVE that I missed one of them that I did. Roosevelt's economic program. How retarded is it that I missed that? I just wasn't thinking. I managed to get the govt's largest payout question down to two possibilities and guessed the wrong one of those two. I also missed Jonestown, which I had also narrowed to two and guessed the wrong one.
I also got a 95%, though two of those were because I misread "Andrew Johnson" as "Andrew Jackson" and "Thomas Paine" as "Thomas Jefferson." The one I legitimately missed was the one about the Federal Reserve.
Crimminy, I can't get the fold button to work. Anybody know if this works on blogspot?
The Federal Reserve question was the one I missed as well. The answer to the question, "What happens when the federal reserve buys bonds?" that I was looking for -- "The money supply increases" -- wasn't among the choices, and I couldn't think through the chain of causality for the others at 2:00 a.m.
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