Dartmouth 2nd in Cultural Literacy

by Robert Allgyer

Name the three authors of The Federalist Papers. If you can, you are among an elite group of Dartmouth students — just 22.56% of the campus. Who wrote The Wealth of Nations? James Madison? Karl Marx? Plato? Wrong on all three; it was Adam Smith. Don't worry, though; 40.85% of Dartmouth students gave those and other wrong answers.

At the December 4, 1998 Math 5 Chance Fair, Steven Menashi '01 presented a survey that provided an interesting insight into the cultural literacy of Dartmouth students. The study, entitled “What Dartmouth Knows,” found, among other things, that whereas 89.02% of the current Dartmouth student body can correctly identify three of the four Beatles, only 20.12% can name three of the twelve apostles. There was no statistically significant improvement over class years for any question.

Compared to other schools, though, Dartmouth ranks quite well. Six of the survey questions were taken verbatim from surveys conducted at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Cornell. Dartmouth averaged second place. Average rank per question put the schools in this order:

1. Harvard (1.30)
2. Dartmouth (2.33)
3. Stanford (3.16)
4. Princeton (3.33)
5. Cornell (4.83)

Interestingly, the relative strength of each school's score corresponds to the strength of that school's core or distributive requirements. Harvard maintains the most extensive core curriculum. At that university, students are required to satisfy ten separate core subject areas — there are even two subdivisions of both History and Science and there are three subject areas within the Literature requirement. Moreover, unlike the other schools, Harvard has specific core courses that its students must take.

Dartmouth has the next most strict set of requirements: there are eight subject areas, which are defined more broadly than Harvard's, in addition to the requirement that courses taken fulfill both a world culture and an interdisciplinary requirement.

Princeton maintains seven subject areas — defined still more broadly — and, like its score, is similar to Stanford. Cornell, however, has the most lax requirements: there are only four distributive subject areas, with no subcategories; there is only a “breadth and width” requirement that mandates that students learn about a foreign culture and a pre-20th century time period.

Cornell is the only institution in the study from which students may graduate without having taken a single course in literature or in history.