OT: 50 question science test (I got 31 right)

I made the same mistake, thinking a blastocyst was the single cell, but it's the other way around. It's funny how I remember correctly after having that corrected, as if I always knew, which means my brain was in a metastable state on that one.

Some questions are science, too many are just trivia. Eg is this law his 1st, 2nd 3rd or 4th law.

NT

There are 4 laws?

I agree knowing the # of a law is silly. I went too fast and clicked on Werner Heisenberg for h, Planks constant. I knew all the moon questions, but only from Sci fi reading...

George H.

Five. The others are "Death" and "Taxes".

When I was younger, it was death, taxes and the draft, and I got my draft notice on my 21st birthday.

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The question is... what year was it, and did you go?

!967, and no, I didn't go into the Army. I joined the Marines 3 days before the deadline and beat the draft. The feds came looking for me when I didn't show up, and my relatives just told them I was in Marine Corp boot camp in San Diego (MCRD) and they would find me there if they were interested.

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I always got the "Not immediately available" notice. Women and children first. ;-)

Answering random trivia questions about 'science' is not scientific literacy.

Would be much more useful to test whether one can take some data and make inferences from it which lead to generating new knowledge.

So, how did you do on the test?

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It's not a good test of how "scientific" a person is, or whether they think rationally and scientifically. But it's not that bad a test of how interested a person is in science in general. It tests a wide range of knowledge, rather than fine detail - a highly focused nuclear physicist would do badly, whereas someone who has at least a good high school science background, likes to keep up with the latest developments, watches Nat Geo channel, reads New Scientist, and gets lost for hours on Wikipedia's biology pages will do well.

Thus I think it tests for science being an important part of a person's interests, rather than testing their scientific abilities.

That would indeed be interesting - but I am not sure how well it could be done in that sort of format. Testing scientific thinking is going to be very difficult to do with a multiple-choice or other automated scoring system - you can judge a lot about scientific understanding with a question like "What does it mean to say that evolution is a theory?", but you'd have a hard time putting that on an automated website.

I am sure it cannot be done in an automated test.

My concern is that school tests and suchlike are about on the level of the test as posted, and do about the same to measure science 'knowledge'. Then we use the results to grade both students and their teachers on performance.

And then we wonder why people cant actually think their way through a problem.