Test your knowledge and post your score.

"You answered 24 out of 33 correctly — 72.73 %"

Ouch. That's a C- and I used to be about a B student.
I'm sure others here will fare better.

Gah... You answered 29 out of 33 correctly — 87.88 %

28/33

But they're wrong on question #9.

9) Under Our Constitution, some powers belong to the federal government. What is one power of the federal government?

A) Make treaties - their answer
B) Levy income taxes - my answer


See the sixteenth amendment:

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

Indeed, even as non-american I scored better than you

With regards to question #9, I think they meant "What's a power that belongs to the federal government only?" When you read it that way, their answer makes sense. I definitely think that if that's their intent, they need to reword that question.

"25 out of 33 correctly — 75.76 %"

Not too bad for a Brit.

"You answered 28 out of 33 correctly — 84.85 %"

Also not an american

pca

29/33.

30/33

But my parents drive a Civic, so even though it's a European model I guess that experience carries over to American Civics.

Peter

28/33

Not as bad as I feared it would be while taking it!

Dual citizen (schooled in the USA), for what that's worth.

Not bad for a foreigner, but I am a bit disappointed, anyway...

LOL

Aw crap.. only 29/33 here.
Didn't get the Lincoln debate and some of the historical documents quite right.

OTOH, I did own/drive a USA-built Civic for many years, and SWMBO has owned/driven a Civic since 1994.

Cheers

Not as much as you'd think, in the US they have a strange bump sticking out of the rear-end and only 2 or 4 doors...

30 out of 33 correctly — 90.91 %

I'm very impressed with the non-us residents scores.

Hmmm... not as smart as I thought I was.

tanstaafl.

Hooray! I answered 31 out of 33 correctly — 93.94 %
(Would have been 32 if I hadn't flipped one answer at the last minute. )

I'm just relieved that there were no questions on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Anyone? Anyone?

At the level of this survey, getting into Smoot-Hawley would be a bit obscure. There were a handful of topical questions about the Great Depression and about basic Keynesian economics. If topicality is really the thing, you could imagine a question about how oil is priced (or mispriced, as with Enron's manipulation of California's electricity market), or about the Arab Oil Embargo of '73. I'd also be tempted to add a question about Joe McCarthy's communist witch-hunts, Nixon's Watergate, and something about Vietnam...

There is an interesting take on this quiz over at the Daily Kos. Might explain why you don't see a question about Joe McCarthy.


Daily Kos

I don't think it should come as a surprise to anyone that the quiz authors have a right-wing slant; it's hard to pick an answer to Q27 without noticing, and similarly there's something about Q24 that made me suspect "D" wasn't the answer they're looking for, despite Article VI's wording on Treaties made under the Authority of the United States being part of the Law of the Land.

Peter

Ah!

I love this BBS for teaching me about thinking.

Many of the questions certainly have a slant to them, but I didn't spend much time thinking about why they were asked or what the agenda of the test maker may be... or even what it might imply in my head to title this test as 'civics'.

Hmm.

/no tin-foil hat, just happy to review various perspectives

The DailyKos thread inspired me to go dig up a proper U.S. citizenship test from the proper web site. Check out this sample test, which has the answers alongside the questions. It's much more of a names-dates-places test, of the sort that I hated in my junior-high history classes.

An interesting question is whether a "proper" civics class should have more fact regurgitation vs. more analysis (e.g., if we rebelled against the British based on taxation-without-representation, then do citizens whose favorite party is out of power have a similar reason to rebel? If not, why not?)

30/33.

But, then again, I have had food poisoning for over four days.

And the right-wing questions certainly irritated me.