Civic Literacy.

I'm not completely Civicly Literate, with 27 out of 33 correct on this quiz from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI)'s American Civic Literacy Program. That's a score of 82%.

Then again, I'm about as good as people taking it online - the average score for this quiz during November was 78%. And I'm far, far better than elected officials (44% correct) and ordinary joes sent the official version to complete (49% correct). And no, I didn't google for answers. I suspect that some might have done, however, hence the significant difference between the official results and the online results.

The ones I got wrong were entirely in the first section - knowing what was in some-old-guy-with-a-stovepipe-hat's letters and so forth. None of the later ones were incorrect. I assume that not going to school here did me down a little.

The write-up on the dreadful performance of the elected officials is here on Yahoo News. Beware, the test is biased, but I think part of civic literacy is knowing that you are supposed to find a happy answer to a free trade question, not start throwing things at the screen and ranting communistically into your beard. Caveat quizzee.

(Found via More Words Deeper Hole.)