College students receive an F"" in national history, according to recent results of a civic literacy test given by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to college freshmen and seniors across the nation.
UW-Madison scored 15th out of 50 schools. Seniors scored an average of 58 percent while freshmen scored an average of 52 percent. According to these results, seniors scored only 6 percent more.
ISI randomly selected 14,000 students at 50 schools across the nation to take the test, evaluating college students' retention of America's History and Institutions.
Thomas Archdeacon, a UW-Madison history professor, noted his disappointment in college students' inability to answer more than half of the questions in the evaluation.
""It strikes me that although there are some questions in this [test] that seem to test narrowly factual knowledge of American History, there are many questions that seem related either to current events or to substantial issues in the American past that have relevance to current events,"" he said.
The test evaluates what an ""educated"" person should know about his own society.
Archdeacon said, ""If students think that the Declaration of Independence came after the Constitution, then their opinions are not only going to be uninformed, quite likely they are going to be risible.""
Unlike the results for some Ivy League schools, seniors at UW-Madison averaged a better score than freshmen.
Princeton seniors scored 1.7 percent lower than freshmen. Yale University seniors scored 3.09 percent lower than freshmen. At Cornell University, the lowest of all 50, seniors scored 4.95 percent lower than freshmen.
ISI member Mike Andrews said the results show that students from some of the most prestigious universities leave knowing less history than when they started. He called this phenomenon ""negative learning.""
Andrews said this contradicts ""the oft stated claim that universities don't teach facts, they teach critical thinking.""
Archdeacon said the fact that students could not score 70 percent or 75 percent is a ""poor outcome,"" considering they studied the content of the test in high school.
Archdeacon said some of the questions were crafted for students with more than a basic knowledge.
""I wouldn't say that all of these questions are really equally significant,"" he said.
Andrews said ISI urges schools to teach students more factual information than critical thinking, in order for them to retain information and form well-reasoned opinions.
The test is available at http://www.americancivicliteracy.org.
