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Top ten of the Millennium:

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By Amy Vohs

This fall the Arts and Entertainment Channel aired a program naming the most influential people of the past 1,000 years. In a survey conducted by the Apache, IVCC students were able to recognize an average of six of the top ten.

For the 329 students who completed a matching quiz, the average score was 58 percent, 62 percent for men and 55 percent for women. One student received a zero and 15 earned a perfect score. Twelve of the students with perfect scores were men.

Dr. Harriet Custer, vice president of academic affairs, said she was not surprised by the results since all but one of the ten lived prior to the twentieth century. "Students tend to be present oriented, rather than clued into history."

She added, "I don’t know how to account for the gender gap. It’s too easy to simply observe that none of the ten is a woman, although that might make the entire project somewhat less interesting for women."

The typical majors and age ranges that scored over 50 percent on the quiz were: 1. Undecided, 17 to 20 year old males, 2. Business – computer majors, 17 to 20 year old males, and 3. Education majors, 17 to 20 year old females.

Four students were not able to identify William Shakespeare and three missed Christopher Columbus.

"There’s always the possibility that these few students did not take the survey seriously," Dr. Custer said.

The most commonly missed names were Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei.

Geology instructor Mike Phillips said, "The confusion in my classes was due to the oversimplification of the accomplishments of some scientists. It was very difficult to differentiate the works of each in ten words or less."

For history instructor Steve Alvin the list of people named Most Influential was "somewhat flawed."

"It is hard to believe that only five non-Europeans belong in the top 100," Alvin said. "The list was very biased in favor of the greater twentieth century. Only 14 nominees were from the first third of the Millennium."

Alvin pointed out that the nominations came from a Eurocentric group.

"From what I have been able to gather, there was little effort to seek out the opinions of non-European scholars," he said.

To choose the top 100, A & E polled more than 360 journalists, scholars and political leaders. The A & E Editorial Board reviewed the results and compiled the final list.