How DNA Civics measures what you actually know

Most quizzes count one thing: right answers. This one counts two. Every question also asks how sure you are, and that second number does the real work. Getting an answer right tells you something. Being right and knowing you're right tells you more.

The questions cover six areas of civic knowledge, so you leave with more than one number. You see where your grasp is solid and where it wobbles. You also see where your certainty has outrun what you can actually back up.

• Accuracy — the share of questions you get right, overall and in each domain.
• Calibration — whether your stated confidence lines up with whether you were actually right.
• Domain breakdown — the six knowledge areas sorted into what you've got down and what needs work.
• Difficulty pattern — how your accuracy holds up from basic questions to advanced ones.

Every question has a known right answer, so grading correctness is easy. Get it right, get the point. Those points add up to one overall accuracy score plus a score for each domain. No magic here. It's the half of the grade you'd expect.

The other half compares two numbers you already gave us: how confident you felt and how you actually did. Sure and right is well-calibrated. Sure and wrong is overconfidence. Right but hedging is underconfidence. Every domain gets a confidence gap — the distance between how sure you were and how well you scored. Two people can miss the same number of questions and still read completely differently.

Your percentile comes from a fixed table keyed to accuracy. Score 83% and you land in the 85th. It isn't a live ranking against everyone who's taken the quiz, and we won't pretend it is. It marks roughly where your score sits. We'd rather say that plainly than dress an estimate up as a leaderboard.

Two numbers carry the result. Accuracy is how much you know. Calibration is how honestly you read your own knowledge. High accuracy with shaky calibration means you know a lot but feel certain about things you haven't actually pinned down. The reverse — modest accuracy, tight calibration — means you've got a clear-eyed sense of your own gaps. That's a civic skill on its own.

Below the headline numbers sit the domain cards. Each shows how strong you are in that area and its confidence gap, so you can catch where you're overselling and where you're underselling. Then comes the question review. Walk back through what you got right and wrong, each with the correct answer and a short explanation, and the result becomes something to learn from instead of a grade to file away.

This measures knowledge, not values. It checks what you understand about how government and civic life work. It says nothing about what you believe or which side you're on. Ace it and your politics are still your politics. Bomb it and the same holds.

It's also a snapshot. The questions are a fixed set across six domains, sampled from the material rather than all of it, so treat the result as an indicator, not a diploma. The percentile is an estimate. The score reflects the day you sat down and answered. Come back once you've read more and paid closer attention, and take it again.