Jenifer Tidwell ([info]jtidwell) wrote,
@ 2007-11-30 15:27:00
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Current mood:nerdy

Two quizzes
Wow. Has it really been over a month since I posted here? I am lame. :-) (I've been busy, actually. A lot of my blogging has gone into http://comfort-and-joy.net -- our family blog -- and between Thanksgiving vacation and a sick baby, I haven't had a lot of time for blogging in general.)

Anyway. In my blog-reading rounds today, I found two quizzes that tickled my brain enough for me to actually finish them. The easy one first:


The data literacy test.
At least, this should be easy for some of you software engineers. I got a 28, which kind of stunned me. Maybe I know more about programming languages than is good for me...

This is the harder one, at least for me:

The American history, civics, and economics test. Most of us learned this stuff in high school, but how much of it stuck? :-) Rich, you should be able to ace this one. I got an 80%. But if it hadn't been for Ken Burns's "Civil War" and other PBS shows, it wouldn't have been that high; heh heh.

I just realized that this second site holds colleges responsible for failing to teach civics. See, I disagree there. I think this stuff should be taught in high school, and that it's strictly optional at the college level. If someone wants to learn more about 18th-century political philosophy in college, that's fantastic, but don't hold MIT "accountable" for not forcing it down my throat, thank you very much. I liked the practical education I got at MIT. Hmmph.




(3 comments) - (Post a new comment)


[info]cjsmith
2007-11-30 10:43 pm UTC (link)
I agree with you: if it's something every kid should know, it needs to be in high school.

(Reply to this)


[info]pekmez
2007-12-01 02:57 am UTC (link)
Yeah, I was reaching for the high school part of my brain for the history/civics/economics Maybe I learned the political philosophy in college (or didn't, as the case may be - that covered the majority of the questions I got wrong!), but history and civics really should be covered in high school.

I got an 81.67 on the civics test, and a 27 on the data literacy test,
on the basis of just a few CS classes at MIT and about 2 years getting
sucked into software development despite my mechanical engineering degree.
So either I'm overconfident that I actually know what these terms mean, or I know more about programming languages than I give myself credit for.

(Reply to this)


[info]chriscoxadobe
2007-12-01 09:23 pm UTC (link)
data literacy: eek, 29 and correctly identified the B.S. terms

Maybe I should get away from compilers for a while...

(Reply to this)


(3 comments) - (Post a new comment)

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