This is an interesting distribution from this poll. (Ignore the “you’re more awesome than 98% of the population” part)
Normally you’d expect to see a classic bell curve on something like this. But this is more of a bimodal distribution.
It looks like there are two populations taking this poll, one that peaks at 4 and one that peaks at 8/9.
Any ideas?
I think it makes sense. There is a portion of the country that pays attention, so they would score well, and there is a larger portion of the country that does not, and they score right around the score one would get by randomly guessing. Once you start getting informed, it’s not all that difficult to be aware of almost all of the info in this little poll. The difficulty of knowing 9,10, or 11 of the 11 questions is not as high as the initial difficulty of knowing any of them at all.
Basically this test does not measure a very large range of knowlege. It askes 11 fairly easy questions that separates the world into those who’ve paid some attention and those who’ve paid no attention at all.
I agree with Sean… incidentally, I got 10.. I thought we were a fatter nation going with 50%… š
The distribution might be a little bimodal, but I am not sure. I don’t believe it will be strictly normal in shape due to convergence towards the high scoring side. The continuum is bound at 11, so naturally, there will be a convergence of scores. If the quiz had more questions, it might be more normal. However, those who would exist in the high tail of a normal distribution will settle out with scores at 10 and 11, where if there were 14-15 questions, they would settle with scores around 13 or 14. I don’t know how many have taken the quiz, but I am guessing that if enough people participate, it would shift from bimodal to a single mode between 7 and 9, with a bit of skew. I hope it’s not because there are two populations – one that cares to be well informed, and one that prefers not to be.
Soce of 11 by the way. I read too much news and look at too many reports.
11/11. The sheer volume of the people who only got 4 or less reminds me why Leno’s “Jaywalking” segments are not funny. We have abdicated our responsibility to educate in this country. Soon, we will reap the rewards of that approach.
I think the low end is skewed. Randomly guessing should get you~3 correct. More questions would give a better bell curve, I think, but with 100 questions with 4 possible answers, i’d expect a very very small tail below the 25% area. It wouldn’t be a perfectly normal bell curve above that since news-awareness isn’t uniform. Some people know very little, some follow closely.