. . . and not with the kind of score I’ve been used to being able to score on academic tests over the years, just about whenever I really wanted to. . . and also only because of grandparents and parents who were well-read and encouraged reading well-written, high-information books. Oh, and a really rigorous (for the times) 8th grade biology teacher and a few others who didn’t rigorously stifle independent study (yeh, that was a problem even back in those days of yore. . . ). But I was one of the lucky ones for my generation:
Century-old 8th-grade exam: Can you pass a 1912 test?
By contrast, the “sample questions” for the 12th Grade history section for the 2010 NAEP are relatively simplistic, and cover very little of a nature of questions that my generation of 8th-graders would not have been able to ace. *shrugs* Of course, my acing, now, of the five sample questions is no test. But considering that some serious scholarship has demonstrated that college grads generally are barely better informed on American history/civics than high school grads, the chart below is at least somewhat interesting.
