US officials flunk test of American history, economics, civics

Assumption. I didn't see how the respondants were selected, but if I do assume some randomness in the process, the odds of getting many or any Congressmen in a 2500 person result are pretty slim.

PLUS, no congressman with political experience would trust that his name would not be released if he scored in the dismal lower half.

Therefore, the probablility leans more toward dog catchers, and other town officials as the people who identified themselves as having held public office.

What numbers do you want? The information was from the responses of 2500 people.  There are approximately 250 million eligible voters, and I assume they didn't pool grade schools, or the average scores would have been higher.

There are probably less than two thousand people who are either serving  or who have served in Congress.  That's a guess.   There are probably a few hundred thousand people who could say that they served in public office in some capacity, most of those would be as town or county functionaries.

Fact is, since geting 160 people out of 2500 in a random survey would require that there be ten million former or present public servants,  the number is probably higher than the truth. So, it probably means that people found amusement saying they held government office, then answering that they thought that life, liberty, and the pursuit of fast food was self evident truth.

Oh stop. My numbers are illustrative. One could gather up the exact numbers, and be exactly right, but based on my estimates it would take more than 9 million randomly selected people to get 160 congressmen included. But there were not 9 million results in the report, there were 2500.   That assumes they would take the test for anyone, which they would not.  Those numbers should tell you that screwing around with exact numbers is a waste of time.

Take my estimate of 4000 present or past, living Congressmen, double it, triple it, whatever. You are still having to test more than a million people to get there.

Not bullying. You asked why I thought that it would be more likely to be town reps or county reps, and unlikely it would be congressmen who said they were elected officials or had been elected officials, out ot the 2500.

It wasn't 2500, it was a little more. It wasn't 160 elected officials. It was a little more. But when the math reveals that nearly ten million would have to take the test to include 160 Congressmen out of the GUESS of four thousand who exist as past or present Congressmen, then you have to realize that the likelyhood of getting 160 Congressmen  in a pool of just 2500 randomly selected citizens is impossible.

They ASKED the test takers IF they served in as elected officials. That tells you that they didn't KNOW, and that they didn't specifially TRY to ask Congressmen, or they would not have had to ask.  If my estimates of number of voters, number of Congressmen, etc are off by 100 percent, you are still looking at a requirement of a million or more being randomly selected to get 100 Congressmen to show up in the poll. But I think ten million is a pretty good guesstimate.

But out of the 2500 who took the test, 160 said they served as an elected public official, which is only possible if their elected office was most often a town or county position. Even a state position. But not likely any Congressmen, given the previous opinion which I still hold, that Congressmen are smart enough to avoid telling us what they don't know on purpose.

4000 Congressmen still living, serving or not, 250 million adults,  nearly ten million test takers to get 150 Congressmen among the test takers.

8000 Congressmen still living, 125 million adults, 2.5 million would have to take the test to get 160 Congressmen.

There are only about...heh.. 600 Congressmen serving at a time, and they sit there until they die, usually. So 4000 as the basis allows the six hundred, plus 3400 who retired, still alive, or were voted out, with lots of slop room.

I could care less. It was fun to toss the numbers around. The test doesn't excuse the low scores of citizens, but the information about the test, and the numbers involved, show that there were probably no Congressmen who took the test.

And no, I could not give you exact numbers, because I don't know beyond a guess how many living Congressmen, serving now or in the past, and I don't know how many adults there are in the US. The second I could find out, the first harder, but the estimates demonstrated that it was not necessary. I think I am high on the total Congressman, and high on the number of adult Americans. So  those errors probably cancel out.

Not at all. It is flawed if it was intended to test Congressional reps. But it wasn't intended to test Congressional reps.  It might be flawed, like any such poll or sampling, if it somehow mislead, or gathered information from unrepresentative segments. If it does not adjust for who is likely to answer, or where they asked the questions. I don't know the answers to any of that. So I take it as a data point, without much weight or meaning by itself.

I remember a couple of polls of this sort a while back, where sixty percent of the respondants didn know who Cheney was.  Another that showed that eighty percent disapproved of him. 

Thank you.  Remember, by the time a guy gets to Congress, or real soon after, he learns to never ask a question where he doesn't know the answer, and he never answers a question if he doesn't know, or if he doesn't like the answer.

hahaha,

Here's the test: http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/resources/quiz.aspx

You can run through it it five minutes. I wasn't perfect, but to tell you the truth, the officials that scored less than 50%  don't know much about the country they represent. In my opinion they should be given the choice between education and renewed testing where flunking means you're fired - or to get themselves another job voluntarily.

Nah. You just have to be fast and have the right equipment to catch a dog.