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Scholarly understanding of educational effectiveness as a relationship between desired (expected) goals and achieved results is an extremely complex matter. If we start from the assumption that striving for the effectiveness of education is a correct and socially justified intention, we need to know the tools with which we can measure the effects of education and the result we want to get closer to. But what is the real point of geographic education? Who decides what is considered a desirable outcome? And is the effort to achieve the performances defined in educational standards the meaning of education? In Slovakia, there has been no national-level research dealing with determining the effectiveness of geographical education. In our article, we examine more thoroughly only one of the possible indicators of the effectiveness of geographical education, which is the level of conceptual (fundamental from the point of view of geography) knowledge achieved. This required creating a non-standardized didactic test tool and its application to a set of adult Slovak populations. The testing results showed a relatively high average success rate of solving the tasks by the respondents (72.48%). However, it should be emphasized that the questions mapped the most important topics and curriculum from the 5th year of elementary school. Of the individual thematic units, the respondents achieved the worst results in Cartography (61.78%) and Planetary Geography (68.22%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]