Because of bigotry. Not bigotry back then, modern day bigotry.
Shagnasty:
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.
Bibliothecarius:
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…
The above is spot on. The applicants at the time would have gone in fully prepared for these questions. The exam would not have been sprung on them suddenly on an Internet message board. It’s just what people studied back then, or at least the people who intended to apply to Harvard.
Isn’t this supposed test just another hoax floating around the internet?
Like: [ul]1895 graduation examination for public school students [/li][li]1872 rules for teachers [/li][li]1940 School Discipline Problems [/li][li]LA Math test [/li][/ul]
(Links are to the Snopes debunkings of these.)
astro
October 6, 2011, 5:00am
64
Link to test here - http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf
Doesn’t read like, or come across as hoax. It seems s like a perfectly plausible test for the time and the intended audience, and the scanned page images and type set materials seem perfectly genuine. What makes you think it’s a hoax?
BTW you might want to check your own links the LA math test is classified as “true”.