EDITOR’S CORNER
One of those surveys came out last week, the kind that’s supposed to induce “what have we come to?” tsk-tsking.
You know the kind. “Forty percent of respondents can’t find their own front door without an app.”
This one came from something called the Woodrow Wilson Center and addresses the supposed knowledge—or lack of it—concerning American History.
Here are some of the results which are supposed to make us despair for the future, and recount stories of how our fifth-grade teacher used to rap us on the knuckles with a sledge hammer if we forgot the date of the Battle of Hastings:
• 72 percent could not identify, or mis-identified, the 13 original states.
• 37 percent think Ben Franklin invented the light bulb.
• 12 percent identified Dwight Eisenhower as a Civil War general.
• Even with all the recent carpet-bombing coverage of the Supreme Court, 57 percent did not know how many justices sit on that panel.
• And my personal favorite, two percent identified climate change as a cause of the Cold War.
But I’m not worried and it’s because of two words.
Multiple choice.
Have you ever taken a so-called quiz online?
They scream “Only the top two percent of Harvard scholars can pass this test” and then dare you to take it. The hook is, of course, for us to prove we are as smart as the Harvard brains.
Then you get into it and the questions are all multiple choice. Remember in school when we found out our tests were the “pick em” kind?
We breathed a huge sigh of relief. Why? Because even if we knew absolutely nothing about the subject matter, we still had a chance to be right on every question, just by employing that treasured strategy of every student scholar—the guess.
The Internet quizzes always start out with questions that are so ridiculously easy you wonder why they even bother to give you a choice:
Like this (and I have actually seen this question): In what state is the Alamo located: A. California; B. Arizona; C. Texas; D. New Mexico. (Yes, I got it right).
About every fourth question then, they will throw in one that’s totally irrelevant to the subject. Let’s say it’s Great Books and the question will be: “Who was the publisher of “To Kill a Mockingbird’s” first edition:
A. Harper & Row; B. Random House; C. J. B. Lippincot: D. Simon & Shuster.
The obvious answer is “who cares?” What does that have to do with the qualities of a great book?
So what do we do? Guess. After a while we are guessing at questions to which we already know the answer and don’t even need choices.
And when you get suckered into the next Netquiz, same thing. We just roll the dice between our choices, even if we only have two, never mind even if we know the answer. We’re “trained.”
That’s what I think the Woodrow Wilson Center test takers did. Taking into account the age in which we live, it’s actually pretty good that 88 percent know Eisenhower wasn’t leading Pickett’s Charge on the third day at Gettysburg.
Okay, if you’re just dying to know who was the original publisher of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” it was J. B. Lippincot.
How did I know that? Am I one of Harvard’s two percent?
Nope. I looked it up. And that’s the other thing Internet multiple choice tests encourage us to do.
Cheat.
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