Seems like if I can score 90% (and it should have been 93.3%, if I’d bothered to read two easy questions properly) on a quiz that apparently most college seniors, at every school surveyed, failed—seriously failed: 53.7%, on average, between last year and this—I should be able to score some sheepskin.

Their results:

Average score for this quiz during September: 75.1%
Average score since September 18, 2007: 75.1%

The overall average score for the approximately 7,000 seniors who took the American civic literacy exam was 54.2%, an “F.” That is consistent with the overall average of 53.2% posted by seniors last year. Not one college surveyed can boast that its seniors scored, on average, even a “C” in American civic knowledge.

Harvard seniors scored highest, but their overall average was 69.6%, a “D+.” That is almost identical to the 69.7% earned by Harvard seniors last year. Yale and Princeton seniors averaged only 65.9% and 61.9%, respectively. At 18 colleges, the average senior scored less than 50%.

The average senior failed all four subjects, scoring less than 60% in each.

As someone whose college experience was brief and wholly unrelated to the subjects covered by the quiz, I have to admit to a certain amount of “Ha; take that college boy,” but the satisfaction’s fleeting, because I don’t *want* to do that much better than them. This quiz ought to be mostly easy for most people with a high school education, much less college. Our schools, at all levels, mostly public but obviously some private (as evidenced by the college rankings for this quiz), clearly aren’t getting the job done. It really matters. Our lovely capitalist economy will only take us so far, and even its success requires ultimately that Americans know this stuff. It’s the stuff of our social fabric; if Americans don’t know it, they don’t know why they’re Americans, and what’s made that such a special and important thing. That affects everything.

The quiz can be taken online or printed out here.