Remember, these were true/false questions, so 50% means no knowledge at all.
This isn’t apparent from the data. A score of 50% could mean that nobody knows the answer and everyone is guessing randomly. Or it could mean that 50% of survey-takers know the right answer and 50% mistakenly believe the wrong answer. Or something in between. Without more information, we can’t distinguish which is which.
I’d also argue that three of the questions were ambiguous or uncertain:
Does the big bang really count as an explosion? It’s not much like other explosions.
Are clones really genetically identical? After all, there was a recent study showing [1] that neurons are usually not genetically alike, due to mutations. Organisms are apparently not even genetically identical to themselves.
There are edge cases for gender.
Part of test-taking ability seems to be selectively ignoring ambiguity if you think the people who designed the test weren’t testing for that edge case.
Surveys are really hard to design correctly.
This isn’t apparent from the data. A score of 50% could mean that nobody knows the answer and everyone is guessing randomly. Or it could mean that 50% of survey-takers know the right answer and 50% mistakenly believe the wrong answer. Or something in between. Without more information, we can’t distinguish which is which.
I’d also argue that three of the questions were ambiguous or uncertain:
Does the big bang really count as an explosion? It’s not much like other explosions.
Are clones really genetically identical? After all, there was a recent study showing [1] that neurons are usually not genetically alike, due to mutations. Organisms are apparently not even genetically identical to themselves.
There are edge cases for gender.
Part of test-taking ability seems to be selectively ignoring ambiguity if you think the people who designed the test weren’t testing for that edge case.
[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6336/eaal1641