Recognition of the Presidents

Here, have some interaction, rather than just reading.

This is a quiz where you name as many presidents as you can within 10 minutes, last names suffice. When you're done, you can view data about what percentage of the quiz takers got each president correct and other such data. This blog will be about said data.

Quiz: Linkage

From the quiz, after being taken 1,881,862 times, here is the listing of presidents, in order of their recognition percentage.
1 George Washington 98%
2 George W. Bush 96.3%
3 George H. W. Bush 95.8%
4 Bill Clinton 94.4%
5 Abraham Lincoln 93.7%
6 John Adams 92.4%
7 JFK 91.9%
8 John Quincy Adams 91.6%
9 Richard Nixon 90.8%
10 Franklin Roosevelt 90.6%
11 (tie) Theodore Roosevelt 90.4%
11 (tie) Thomas Jefferson 90.4%
13 Ronald Reagan 89.6%
14 Lyndon Johnson 86%
15 (tie) Andrew Johnson 85.8%
16 (tie) Jimmy Carter 85.8%
17 Gerald Ford 82.6%
18 Andrew Jackson 81.4%
19 Dwight D Eisenhower 79.6%
20 James Madison 78.1%
21 Herbert Hoover 76.4%
22 James Monroe 76%
23 Harry S Truman 74.5%
24 William Taft 74%
25 Ulysses S Grant 73.8%
26 William Henry Harrison 70.9%
27 Benjamin Harrison 70.3%
28 Grover Cleveland 69.8%
29 Woodrow Wilson 69.7%
30 James K Polk 67.8%
31 Barack Obama 67.2%
32 Calvin Coolidge 66.8%
33 John Tyler 64.6%
34 James Garfield 64.5%
35 William McKinley 64%
36 Zachary Taylor 63.3%
37 Martin Van Buren 62.5%
38 Millard Fillmore 57.9%
39 James Buchanan 57.6%
40 Warren Harding 56.4%
41 Franklin Pierce 56.1%
42 Chester Arthur 55%
43 Rutherford B Hayes 53.3%

There are a few things I notice about this list. First thing is Barack Obama's being low on it. But this can probably be explained by the quiz adding him in after 30ish percent of the people already took it, so cast this aside from your mind.

The next thing I personally notice is Chester Arthur being second to last. I'm disappointed at this, but not surprised. There's probably not 100 people in America who find Chester Arthur to be their favorite president.

William Henry Harrison has over 70% recognition and is 26th on the list. What did this man do? He died within a month of inauguration. He also gave the longest inaugural speech. But I'm thinking the majority of this recognition is due to the former. It's unfair to men like Pierce, Arthur, and Hayes, that William Henry Harrison who didn't do anything is more highly recognized than they are. Hayes may not have been a very good president, nor Pierce, but at least they did something. Arthur is generally underappriciated anyway, but I won't go off on a tangent about him.

Interestingly, George Washington is number 1, but Abraham Lincoln falls behind the Bush's and Clinton. This tells me that there are likely a number of people who know the recent presidents (within their adult life) and the first, but not even the other important ones like the Roosevelt's and Lincoln.

Other than that, there's not much to glean from this information. The more famous presidents understandably get more recognition than Gilded Age and pre-Civil War post-Missouri Comprimise presidents.