Are you smarter than our elected officials?

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UPDATE: Warning, this test actually has some right-wing motives behind it.

I sure hope so, because they're pretty dumb, if this story is to be believed. Or more precisely, they are sadly under-informed on issues that bear immediate relevance to their work. Take the quiz yourself and find out. I got 33 out of 33 correct. A few questions I wasn't quite sure of, but I guess the guessing gods smiled upon me. Apparently our elected officials didn't do so well:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.

Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

"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.

"How can political leaders make informed decisions if they don't understand the American experience?" he added.

The exam questions covered American history, the workings of the US government and economics.

HT and headline from BarbinMD on DailyKos.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I got 31 out of 33. But I remember your doing this quiz or one like it once before so that might have helped me.
7:43 PM, November 24, 2008
grishnash said…
31 of 33 also. I'm annoyed that I missed the last one because I hadn't known how many questions there would be, and guessed there would be about 15 or so. I rushed through the end and misread "debt" as "deficit". That's really annoying because I hate when people do that.
9:49 AM, November 25, 2008
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