Report: 1 in 10 college grads say Judge Judy is a Supreme Court justice

(Image credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

last updated 18 January 2016

Americans' civic knowledge continues to be abysmal, finds a new report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). "Survey after survey shows that recent college graduates are alarmingly ignorant of America’s history and heritage," the authors note, and federal civics testing has not improved the situation.

Among the more disheartening findings of this analysis:

- How do Americans amend the Constitution? More than half of college graduates didn’t know. Almost 60 percent of college graduates failed to identify correctly a requirement for ratifying a constitutional amendment.- We live in a dangerous world — but almost 40 percent of college graduates didn’t know that Congress has the power to declare war.- And 9.6 percent of college graduates marked that Judith Sheindlin — "Judge Judy" — was on the Supreme Court! [ACTA]

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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