The mathematics, absolutely as a senior in highschool; it would take today-me longer than high-school-me, but I can still do those problems. I never studied Greek or Latin, but as a senior, I could have done those translations in the language I did study (today, that’s less likely). And, if I’m reading it correctly, a lot of the history/geography section seems to overlap a quite bit with the Greek/Latin section, as in those are questions about works the students would have translated in Classics.
Well, how do you suppose calculators do it?
if you’re not particularly worried about efficiency, you just keep squaring/cubing numbers and seeing if they’re too high or too low, thus zeroing in on the right answer. This is, after all, in some sense the fundamental relevant concept. No doubt, if I were to imprison you in a dungeon and force you to calculate a few square/cube roots to escape (math education by sink or swim), you would have thought of this and soon enough been free.
You don’t have to stumble around completely blindly, either. You can do this in a disciplined manner: Step through all the possible first digits of the answer to find the appropriate first digit, then step through the possible second digits to tack on till you figure out the second digit, then figure out the third, and so on…
This is still not terribly efficient, but with a small bit of polishing, it’s apparently the method Jas09 learnt in school. It’s usable.
If you want more efficiency, there’s the Babylonian method: to calculate the square root of X, start with a guess, then keep updating your guess to somewhere inbetween your old guess and X divided by your old guess (e.g., take their average). The right answer will be between those two, and eventually they’ll narrow down to the point where you have enough precision to call it quits. (Similarly, for the cube root of X, you can average your guess and X divided by the square of your guess)
Of course, all of this is rather tedious. Thank god for calculating slaves (i.e., computers).
Then what is proletariat black women’s fare?
Survival.
All right, I confess my ignorance about calculating square and cube roots. Clearly this was a lost art by the time I was in high school.
Some of the math I could do now, although some of the terminology seems a bit old-timey and cryptic to me. I’ve forgotten most of my high school trigonometry, though. I’d probably use Taylor series for the square and cube roots; I’m not sure that would be what they would be looking for.
I’ve never known any Latin or Greek.
I would just like to say that this thread caused me to have the “college nightmare” last night. You know the one…you’ve forgotten to go to class all semester and the final exam is tomorrow and you have to pass or your dog will die. And oh, by the way…did you realize you forgot to put on pants before you left the house this morning?
I couldn’t answer one single thing. (Wait, that’s not true – I could do almost all of the arithmetic section) But maybe Radcliffe would have taken me ten years later…
I’m surprised applicants were expected to know Latin and Greek but not Calculus.
The math problems are simple enough conceptually, but my god would that be tedious to actually do. I think I’d have a brain hemorrhage from boredom.
The Latin isn’t terribly hard. The exam tells you what verbs and nouns to use in the translation! After that it’s a matter of declining them correctly.
The history/geography section is strange by modern standards. “Name the chief rivers of Ancient Gaul and Modern France”…then in the next part of the question it asks if ancient Gaul or Modern France were larger. Only questions 8 and 9 could have made it onto a modern history exam, at Harvard or anywhere else; 7 is a fill-in-the-blank, and the other questions are “you know it or you don’t”. 1 through 7 are just contextless questions, to be honest. Wonder how much the exam changed from year to year…if it didn’t I would certainly be memorizing the whole of the Manilian Law.
The mathematics sections look harder than they are, I think. There are some archaic terms and usages like “square rods” and Lsd monetary notation but they would have been familiar to the 19th-century student. And I pity the fool who went to Harvard to study math and got tripped up by #9.
I’ve also got to wonder how much of this exam was to separate the better from the best as opposed to “who got in and who didn’t.” There are vague references to “advanced standing” but no other explanations along those lines.
The Greek and Latin are, well, Greek to me. Apparently history stopped around the time Christ was born.
The math is straight out of my 8-10th grade classes but are much more complicated than anything I’ve seen on tests. The math part would take a while to do and I would need log tables and some geometry tools.
I’d need a while but I think I could work out the math.
As for the rest of the test? Meh, I’ll settle for Yale. 
I knew nothing on there except “What is a prime number?”, and that was only part of one question! Maybe I would have been able to do one or two of the other math questions back when I was at school. I don’t feel bad, though, because I haven’t been to any college, never mind the best college in America back in Victorian times.
What are (V) and (VI) of the History and Geography actually asking?! They’re not even questions, they’re just lists! And question (IV) - the 10,000-- what?
What’ astonishing to me is their scope of history. There’s one question about US geography, one about South American geography (both about rivers, for god’s sake), and the rest is about ancient Europe (with a little Middle East thrown in). I’m not expecting 19th century to give a crap about east Asia or subSaharan Africa (let alone Australia), but seriously, no questions about the American Revolution? About our own legal system? In 1869, nothing about the Civil War?
It was indeed a very different approach to education.
It’s true it was a different time for the study of history. Back in the mid-19th century most of the English historians were writing about ancient and medieval England too; it wasn’t until J.R. Green and A Short History of the English People that anyone seemed to care about what anyone might expect to call “one’s own people.”
This might not have been the whole exam, too; there may have been a section on “Our Country.”
And, just saying, but only four years after the end of the Civil War questions about it might have been a little raw.
There were a couple of items that weren’t questions. I had no idea what was expected as the answer. For example, Item 5 on the History and Geography section.
“V. Leonidas, Pausanias, Lysander.”
What do you want to know: Who are they? Where are they? What are they?
What’s the damn question? The next one isn’t much better. Three more words are given and then an em dash “geographically and historically.” Geographically and historically what?
Half the trick of getting into Harvard must have been understanding the shorthand exam language that, apparently, was clear back in the day.
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?
Was there an answer key?
I also wondered about this. I was speculating that you were supposed to write your answers on a separate sheet (yes, I remember college and these types of exams). Did they have “blue books” in those days, or did you just use loose paper?
I’d be frightened of a question as broad as “Compare Athens with Sparta”, but even after all this time I do know (iirc) that Sparta was more authoritarian and placed high value on valor and physical fitness, while Athens was more academic and democratic, but I’d be at a loss to come up with more than a few historical figures or incidents as evidence of this. Thinking back, most questions asked in school had some context, which, in this case, may be lost due to culture. Perhaps the “prep schools” taught you what these questions mean and what, specifically, they are looking for you to say or mention. (i.e. if they primarily want to see at least X regurgitated king names, heroes, incidents, dates, and contemporary quotations strewn haphazardly to see if you learned enough factoids about Ancient Greece (can’t get in to Harvard unless you know at least 5 kings or heroes from Athens, 5 kings or heroes from Sparta, and can regurgitate a quote from at least 2 of each in the original Greek), or if they want you to SELECT something about Athens and Sparta and develop a thesis and present evidence. E.g., candidate selects as their answer “The Spartan military achieved more victories than the Athenian one due to Sparta’s emphasis on physical fitness”, and then fails to mention anything about architecture, agriculture, Greek dialects, religious practices, physical geography, or your mom because they don’t fit in his thesis)
Yes. I suppose in another hundred years, kids will have to write essays on 9/11 and be able to name all the hijackers.
And you haven’t bought the textbook!
The blurb, though, doesn’t say that they were “white man’s fare”. It says they were “ethnocentric” and “tailor-made for wealthy white men”. I’m at a loss as to why. I’m guessing most of the men studying those subjects weren’t Italian, Greek, or middle Eastern, so the “ethnocentricity” seems a bit misplaced. British history would have been a more ethnocentric choice. As for math and geography, I don’t get it that they’re “tailor-made” for anybody.