Most U.S. College Seniors Flunk Test on ‘Basics’

College seniors don’t know much about history or literature. Nearly a quarter of them did not know that Franklin D. Roosevelt was President during the Depression, and an equal number identified an excerpt from “The Communist Manifesto” as part of the U.S. Constitution, according to findings of a study released Sunday.

The Gallup Poll result also suggests considerable ignorance of other basic facts. One-fourth of those polled were unaware that Christopher Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere before 1500.

Nearly 60% of those surveyed did not know the Korean War started during President Harry S. Truman’s term (14% thought it began while John F. Kennedy was in the White House); 58% did not know that William Shakespeare wrote “The Tempest.” Only 58% of the students knew that the Koran is a sacred text of Islam; 12% identified it as a Jewish text, the survey found.

The survey consisted of 87 questions with multiple-choice answers.

“If the students’ answers were to be graded, more than half of those tested would have failed,” concluded the report on the study, which was conducted for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Citing the results, NEH Chairwoman Lynne V. Cheney on Sunday called for colleges and universities to revise their curricula so that undergraduates must study “essential areas of knowledge.”

In a booklet titled “50 Hours,” she suggested a core curriculum for teaching “basic landmarks of history and thought.”

About 55% of the students, surveyed in the spring of their senior year, answered fewer than 60% of the questions correctly.

Even more troubling, the report said, was that more than a third of the questions were taken from a 1986 test designed for 17-year-olds. When only those questions expected to be answered correctly by most 17-year-olds were considered, 49% of the college seniors still failed.

The students even had trouble with five history questions from citizenship tests for immigrants. Only two of those questions were answered correctly by a high proportion of students.

Of the 696 students at 67 colleges who took the test, 68% failed the literature section and 39% failed the history section.

About 83% of them did not know that T. S. Eliot wrote “The Wasteland” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock;” 58% could not identify Plato as the author of “The Republic.”

On the bright side, 95% knew that Mark Twain wrote “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Some 42% of the students could not place the Civil War within half a century, and 55% could not identify the Magna Carta.

About 23% of them said that the phrase, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” was part of the U.S. Constitution instead of “The Communist Manifesto” of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

On average, men scored higher than women, and the seniors in private schools had higher scores than public university students.

Cheney said that many colleges and universities award bachelor’s degrees to students who have taken no courses in history, literature, science or mathematics. He urged that trustees and administrators support faculty efforts to strengthen general education requirements.