The Monroe Doctrine was... what?

Don't feel bad, almost 75 percent of college students don't know the answer either, according to a recent study.

From a sampling of more than 14,000 students from 50 different colleges, the study found that college seniors knew 53.2 percent of the 60 multiple-choice questions they were asked, equaling an "F" grade. Freshmen, by comparison, scored lower.

Entitled The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education's Failure to Teach American History and Institutions, the study was conducted by the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy and funded by Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). Topics included American history, government, America and the world and market economy.

"We believe this is a big deal," said Mike Ratliff, executive director of the American Civic Literacy Program. "You are ready at different points in your education to study history in greater depth."

ISI ranked colleges based on their scores, and absent from the top of the list are the Ivy League schools. The top three slots all belong to less recognized colleges: Rhodes College, in Memphis, Tenn., Colorado State University and Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, Mich. The first Ivy League institution is Princeton University, at number 18. Penn State was not included in the study.

"I have had some very excellent history students at Penn State," Wilson Moses, professor of American history, said. "Let's face it, there are many people who simply don't care about history. In general, I am quite pleased."

The study is the largest statistically valid observation of its kind, save for the SAT, Ratliff said. Beyond that, there is no study to determine what college kids know, he added.

The lack of knowledge at the collegiate level has been speculated and, through the study, "we've put numbers to the sense that many people have written about -- that we are in trouble," he said.

Moses called into question the message the study sends and what a probable alternative may be.

"In American universities, we unfortunately tend to equate 'teaching effectiveness' with 'customer satisfaction,' " he said. "Students could achieve higher scores on such a test if universities were to abolish history departments and instead distribute to each freshman a list of 100 essential questions, require that every student memorize them by rote and pass a test with a score of 100 before graduation."

While the top schools on the list exhibited increased knowledge of American history as students progressed, some schools showed the reverse -- freshmen knew more than seniors did. Schools that demonstrated this "negative learning" include some of the nation's most prestigious universities: Yale, Georgetown, Duke and Cornell.

"I haven't really taken any classes about American history, but I think that it concerns me, just like it may concern any other U.S. college student," Peter Marinescu, a junior at Cornell, said. "I find it interesting how other people in the past acted and how we ended up where we are today."

Not content with merely pointing out flaws in college curriculums, the ISI has offered up several solutions. After institutions evaluate how effective they are at furthering historical knowledge, the ISI advises that more courses touch on the topics in question. The ISI also recommends that whatever administration runs each university should hold its faculty and curriculum responsible.