# Can You Pass Harvard's 1869 Entrance Exam? (check it out!) **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 3, 2011, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477 "2011-10-03T21:01:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Enderw24](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ba9def/32.png) [@Enderw24](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enderw24)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2011, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/41 "2011-10-04T21:42:34Z")
OK, for those of you being either obtuse (deliberately or not) what do you think the results would be of a black woman from 1869 trying to take this exam? Assumed in this hypothetical is that she would even be allowed to take it, rather than be laughed out of the room, lynched, or both. ---
**Author:** ![Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a587f6/32.png) [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freddy_the_Pig)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2011, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/42 "2011-10-04T21:48:32Z")
> [@Enderw24](#): > > OK, for those of you being either obtuse (deliberately or not) what do you think the results would be of a black woman from 1869 trying to take this exam? Assumed in this hypothetical is that she would even be allowed to take it, rather than be laughed out of the room, lynched, or both. The assertion wasn’t about the exam. It was about “elite education”. It asserted that the course of study was “tailor-made for white males”, apparently reflecting an assumption that languages, ancient history, and math are inappropriate for women and non-whites. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2011, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/43 "2011-10-04T22:08:27Z")
You don’t have to be specifically Italian or Greek to feel a certain kinship for European culture which no doubt influenced the choice of focus on those subjects. ---
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2011, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/44 "2011-10-04T23:14:57Z")
I think I could do the maths questions given enough time, but they are far too dull for me to attempt now. I could do a few of the history questions, assuming the Leonidas, etc one was asking ‘who were these people.’ Or possibly it was an ‘odd one out question.’ The rest is completely beyond me. > [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](#): > > The assertion wasn’t about the exam. It was about “elite education”. It asserted that the course of study was “tailor-made for white males”, apparently reflecting an assumption that languages, ancient history, and math are inappropriate for women and non-whites. No, it’s that women and non-whites, and most poor people, weren’t taught those those things at school. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2011, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/45 "2011-10-04T23:31:22Z")
I didn’t bother doing anything with the latin and greek section, I got probably 90% of the history and geography, and about half of the math - but if it was times I would not be able to have done it _unless_ it was within a year or so of graduating high school so I would still have the crap memorized. [I did algebra, trig and geomoetry in my senior year … don’t ask me how I managed to pass AP chemistry without doing them first … but I did.] I always wanted to sort of reboot my education and get the classic trivium and quadrivium as a university degree. ---
**Author:** ![Duke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e8c25b/32.png) [@Duke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duke)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/46 "2011-10-05T01:21:21Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > Yes. I suppose in another hundred years, kids will have to write essays on 9/11 and be able to name all the hijackers. You have to remember that Southerners as well as Northerners were trying to get into Harvard. I don’t think most US universities were trying to recruit kids from Al Qaeda High in 2005. ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 5:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/47 "2011-10-05T05:11:38Z")
Should I feel embarassed that I have no idea what “the March of the Ten Thousand” refers to? ---
**Author:** ![Scissorjack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c67d28/32.png) [@Scissorjack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scissorjack)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 6:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/48 "2011-10-05T06:50:34Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > Should I feel embarassed that I have no idea what “the March of the Ten Thousand” refers to? [No, but it wouldn’t kill you to look it up.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophon) ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 6:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/49 "2011-10-05T06:51:42Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > Should I feel embarassed that I have no idea what “the March of the Ten Thousand” refers to? Only reason I knew what it was, or was able to do as much of the test as I did was an odd liking for reading, and inheriting most of my grandfather’s library, which oddly enough had many books that were in use by university students at the turn of the last century, and have read them all. Actually, I also have the Anabasis as an audio book, as well as Beowulf, Odyessy and Iliad, and Suetonius Lives of the 12 Caesars … Though I could draw the route on a map, I could not draw a map myself. ---
**Author:** ![Silophant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a698b9/32.png) [@Silophant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Silophant)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/50 "2011-10-05T06:58:08Z")
Hm. The Latin and Greek are right out, of course, but I might have gotten about a 50% on the History and Geography Section, and I’d definitely be able to do the math, though I’d miss my calculator terribly. ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 7:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/51 "2011-10-05T07:30:05Z")
I am not very impressed. I doubt actual Harvard student’s today would do that great on much of the test and they are much more talented and intellectual overall than their predecessors were just because the talent pool is so much bigger now. That is true for most competitive colleges and universities. You see these kinds of old test samples from lots of different schools at all levels with the implication being that students were so much more studious and disciplined back then. No they weren’t. The Flynn effect shows that most people from the old days would be identified as borderline retarded by today’s educational testing standards and even the best from the old days would still fall generally in the middle of the pack today. Why do the tests seem so hard to us then? It’s because they studied a bunch of useless crap hard before they took it. The same is true for any special knowledge test out there from any time. Find a copy of your old college exams and see how well you do or honestly take your child’s junior high or high school exam today. You wouldn’t do so well on those either although you know it can be done without much difficulty if that is what you prep for. ---
**Author:** ![Bibliothecarius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b2d939/32.png) [@Bibliothecarius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bibliothecarius)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 11:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/52 "2011-10-05T11:20:58Z")
The Latin section would be close to dead easy if you had actually studied it. And that’s the key thing, a high school education in the 20th and 21st centuries is a totally different thing to a 19th century education. This is the sort of thing people actually learned in school back then, more on the order of a “classical education” - Latin and Greek (both language and advanced literature, which was the entire point of learning it, to read Ovid and Horace and such), geography, mathematics, etc. The Latin section is the equivalent of asking a high school graduate to spell “refrigerator” or define “verb” (granted, some high school graduates can’t actually do this in an era of declining education standards, but _in theory_ you _should_ be able to if you paid attention in school.) Presumably the math that looks so difficult to us would be relatively easy for them because that’s what they were taught. And the lack of American history questions is no surprise. American history had only just _begun_, let alone the actual study of it as a field of history in its own right (not until the 1820s or so, IIRC). Likewise, the Civil War was barely more than current events so probably wouldn’t have been included in any case. An American education at that time was still largely a British (ie classical) based education. For the record, I might only just squeeze in a passing grade on the Latin section (largely because the answers are half there anyway! :eek:) but would totally flunk the rest of it. But that’s because I was educated in the 20th century… ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/53 "2011-10-05T13:24:09Z")
Sorry if I just can’t make myself feel like an idiot for not knowing the ingredients of Olde Tyme Moustache Wax or who John L. Sullivan beat to win the bareknuckle boxing heavyweight championship. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/54 "2011-10-05T17:34:57Z")
I could do only the math. At least if I knew what a rod was I could. As for the square and cube roots, I would use the goddam power series expansions for the functions. Yes, I can do the square root algorithm, but it is easier to start with the facts that 29^2 = 529 and .2^3 = .008. But why do you guys (a word is use without sexual meaning) think we taught you power series? Just to bug you on exams? Since others have commented that the Latin and Greek are easy (if you know them), maybe the exam was easy. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/55 "2011-10-05T19:31:22Z")
What is the advantage of the power series calculation over the much simpler Babylonian method? [In case you are worried, note that the Babylonian method converges very quickly: each iteration at least doubles the number of accurate digits, and adds even another accurate bit on top of that. I am not sure how quickly the power series converges; I suppose I could figure it out from the Taylor series remainder formula, but I am lazy at the moment. Computer simulation shows that none of this really matters for the particular example on the exam, though; they both converge just about immediately to the requisite accuracy, and indeed quite quickly to the full 23.054283766797006 Haskell is willing to tell me without invoking bignums] ---
**Author:** ![hogarth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hogarth/32/1773_2.png) [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/56 "2011-10-05T20:09:03Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > What is the advantage of the power series calculation over the much simpler Babylonian method? The advantage is that I know one method and not the other. ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/57 "2011-10-05T20:35:01Z")
> [@Dogzilla](#): > > I love Item 8: “Compare Athens with Sparta” and then only about two line spaces are given. Hell, I could write a 40-page paper comparing Athens with Sparta and I’ve never really studied either. How the hell do you come up with an acceptable 2-line answer that’s Harvard-entrance caliber? I’m guessing that you are supposed to write in a separate answer book, not on the exam paper. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/58 "2011-10-05T20:48:19Z")
> [@hogarth](#): > > The advantage is that I know one method and not the other. Babylonian method: To figure out sqrt(N), make a guess, then average your guess with N/your guess to get a better approximation, repeat till you have the desired accuracy. Boom, now you know both. (Unless you were saying this was the one you knew from the start) ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/59 "2011-10-05T21:12:08Z")
I suspect this is only one of TWO tests that Harvard used to give out. This one was given to working class kids who wanted to go to Harvard. The OTHER test had only two questions: 1. “When did your Dad graduate from Harvard?” 2. “How much is he willing to donate this year?” ---
**Author:** ![Ms\_Boods](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Ms\_Boods](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ms_Boods)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477/60 "2011-10-05T23:54:06Z")
Could easily do most of the Latin, Greek and history stuff off the top of my head _now_ but it kinda helps to have a PhD and to teach the history of Greece and Rome every semester (and am currently marking a boatload of Greek history essay exams)…but, except for the Latin, could not have done so as an 17-18 year old, of course! As for the math – nope. eta – as the others have said, if you had already a year or two of Latin or Greek, those sections were pretty straightforward; by the time I was 17 I’d had a couple years of Latin grammar. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-pass-harvards-1869-entrance-exam-check-it-out/598477.md?page=4)