Watch NYC College Students Flunk A 5th-Grade Quiz

NEW YORK — New York University has produced such luminaries as the historian Howard Zinn and Jonas Salk, who discovered the first polio vaccine. But some of the school's current students got stumped by a word that would be a gimme in any spelling bee.

Astoria resident Evan Ramino asked a dozen NYU students to spell "shepherd" in a video he posted to YouTube last Monday. Nine missed the mark and only three got it right — one of whom was wrong on her first try.

That was one of seven questions with which Ramino quizzed 10 to 12 groups of students hanging out in Washington Square Park earlier this month to see if they were "smarter than a fifth grader." While none of the students got them all correct, the 31-year-old admitted that they're likely still pretty sharp.

"It’s just probably things they learned and they forgot," said Ramino, who is himself pursuing a master's degree in computer science at Pace University. "I think they’re very smart people ... I just think that these (are) questions that nobody has looked at for a while."

Ramino included five of the questions in the video on his YouTube channel, "E onDaStreets." He searched for questions online and picked some he thought were "relatable" and not too hard, he said.

Others were a little tougher than spelling — What's the world's smallest ocean? (The Arctic.) What's the capital of Florida? (Tallahassee.) Who takes over if the president and vice president die? (The speaker of the House.) What's the solar system's outermost planet? (Neptune.)

The students' spelling struggles surprised Ramino, but he said they showed some smarts on the political questions.

"Maybe they just keep up with current events," he said. "... Or maybe I was close to (the) political science building."

Ramino picked up video production as a hobby in 2017. He's since amassed nearly 1,300 subscribers on YouTube and some of his videos have racked up thousands of views.

Ramino likes the man-on-the-street format, which he's put to use in some of his other works.

"I get to talk to strangers and I enjoy that," he said. "Why not just go talk to strangers on camera and make content out of that, and try to make it funny?"

Watch Ramino's full video below.