Presidents Day Weekend may be upon us, but students at Brown and colleges around the country know surprisingly little about past presidents of the United States, according to a recent study from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
The study utilized test scores from a 60-question test administered to 14,000 college freshmen and seniors at 50 universities across the country in the fall of 2005. The survey asked questions about topics including economics, international relations and American history.
Students were asked multiple choice questions about such presidents as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
"There was less gain in knowledge (from freshman to seniors) about American presidents than there was on all the other subjects," said Gary Scott, senior research fellow at ISI, a conservative group.
First-year students answered 57.2 percent of the questions about presidents correctly, and seniors did only marginally better, answering 57.6 percent correctly.
At Brown, seniors did worse than freshmen on the presidential section - first-years scored 62.5 percent, and seniors managed to correctly answer just 59.8 percent. Overall, Brown finished 48th of 50 in American History and 44th of 50 in American politics.
Scott noted that "the lesser-known colleges scored better," on the test but that such esteemed institutions as "Cornell, Yale and Duke (universities) scored close" to Brown.
Rhodes College had the best performance in the sections on American politics and world affairs, Colorado State University had the highest marks on the economics portion and Grove City College students ranked first in American history.
But while knowledge of presidential facts is important, it is not indicative of how educated someone is, said Associate Professor of History Michael Vorenberg, who has published works on Abraham Lincoln.
"I don't know if the highest priority should be given to knowledge about what was considered to be basic political knowledge 100 years ago," Vorenberg said.
Vorenberg was reluctant to put much stock in the study, questioning its ability to assess the quality of a student's education.
"I would want to know who was polled by this organization and what was its purpose in conducting these polls," he said. "If you assume the facts that this poll reports are true, is this necessarily a problem?"
When asked four questions from the ISI test by The Herald, Brown students for the most part were able to answer questions about presidents correctly.
Hee Kyung Chung '09, who attended high school in the Netherlands, answered two of four questions correctly.
"I find it really shocking that four years of college doesn't do much to add to the knowledge of the history of the country that you're living in," she said.
Jesse Bateman '10 and Alex Linkin '10 both correctly answered three of the questions. Bateman attributed their answers to knowledge from high school.
Alexis Lawrence '07 declined to take the sample test, as she felt her presidential knowledge to be inadequate. "In high school, talking about history and presidents is an everyday thing, whereas in college we only talk about these subjects if we elect to do so," she said, adding, "especially at Brown, where everything is optional."
