Could You Pass Harvard's Entrance Exam From 1869? 741
erfnet writes "The New York Times remembers back to when 'college was a buyer's bazaar' and digs up 19th-century classified ads from Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and others. In competitive efforts to attract students from the limited pool of qualified candidates, applications were taken as late as September for an October freshman class. Vassar offered lush room accommodations. The expectations were high: Latin, Greek, Virgil, Caesar's Commentaries; Harvard's entrance exam from 1869 is posted (PDF). Could any of us pass the exam today?"
Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt they'd be able to pass a modern test either. These people grew up with a different curriculum than those at the latter half of the 20th century / new millennium.
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This is especially true with regards to languages; Greek and Latin are optional, if even available, while it seems as though they were mandatory back then.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
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I was educated in US public schools, but I am pretty sure that I could ace that one, and that by todays standards it would have been considered an easy test.
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The algebra, trig, and geometry is all pre-calc. I would hope a high school junior expecting to go to college would get most of those. (Certainly one expecting to go to Harvard or study any hard science.) The only one I doubt I'd get was the one with square rods.
As for the Latin & Greek, give me a zero on that section.
I comfort myself knowing my physics and chemistry would win multiple Nobel prizes.
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Yes, I was surprised by that comment too. The maths part of the test is tedious, but none of it is actually hard. I'd find it quite time-consuming, but that's largely because most of the things on the test I learned before I was 16 and haven't actually had to do for over a decade. Almost any of those questions now would be answered with the aid of a computer, so if I had to solve them with just a pen and paper then it would be more effort. I'm pretty sure that one of the proof questions came up on my GC
Re:Nope (Score:5, Funny)
I've never even heard of Greek being taught in high school...
I heard Greek is mandatory in Greek high schools.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
the question becomes: is it the same greek as being asked here. In 1869 Greece was 20 years independent from ottoman rule and still basically a nothing state on the world stage (not that it's much of anything today). Greek as taught in modern greece (or in this case 1860's greece) is not necessarily the same as the various versions of greek that would pre-date the modern world. There are classical language courses you can take at some schools, including universities, but the version of greek harvard is asking about in 1869 probably has relatively little bearing on contemporary greek of that period let alone modern greek.
Today you can find greek in a smattering of countries, italy, turkey and greece being the big ones, but armenia, ukraine, cyprus and a few others as well, but no more than a person today could do well with old english (which is nearly unintelligible), or middle english (shakespeare and KJV bible era, which is somewhat comprehensible).
I think probably if you could pass that exam today you could probably still do well in most liberal arts programmes at least. It shows an ability to grasp foreign languages (always handy), and a relatively diverse reading set. Not that there wouldn't be better measures of success today though. I think a modern scientist faced with an exam from 140 years ago might have a lot of trouble. There's language, terminology and style advances, skills that have largely been obsoleted (by for example the calculator), and then well, we know more now than they did then of course. Even if the math is the same, the way the math is written has changed quite a lot (hello matrices!). Any test carries with it the context of its time, and there's probably a ripple effect. What is today a challenging entrance exam at harvard or a PhD level topic in programming will 20 or 30 years from now be pushed into the highschool curriculum, and then 20 or 30 years later it will likely be long forgotten as it is supplanted by new problems and techniques.
Middle English (Score:5, Informative)
This is a minor point, but Shakespeare and the King James Bible aren't Middle English; they're Early Modern English from the early 1600's. They are almost completely recognizable to a speaker of modern English, especially once the "thou/you" distinction is explained, and with the occasional vocabulary word. For an example of Middle English, the best known example is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (late 1300's), http://www.librarius.com/cantales/genpro.htm [librarius.com]. That's significantly more difficult to understand, though if you sound it out, and read about the rules of grammar, it doesn't take too much practice before you can read it without trouble.
But you're right, the big change was from Old English, which was a Germanic language that is far more intelligible to modern German speakers than modern English speakers. Our current language is highly influenced by the importation of French and Latin words after the Norman invasion of 1066.
Re:Middle English (Score:4, Funny)
So when I was a kid, and that old guy from Sussex was always yelling, "áwiergedon cild! tengest min ediscum!", he really was making sense and not just yelling gibberish?
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
and still basically a nothing state on the world stage (not that it's much of anything today).
Us Greeks appreciate your insight...
Anyway, I don't hold grudges, so I will still answer your "question".
Looking at the exam, the "Greek" it refers to is, of course, ancient Greek (the easiest form though, similar to what was used in the Hellenistic period). (At least written) Greek of that period (katharevousa) was actually pretty close. But in any case, ancient Greek is still a mandatory part of Greek high-school (Latin is optional) - I can read Hellenistic period works with no University level training in the subject.
The difference is that in 1869, the classical languages were a big part of university education, since the ancient body of knowledge was comparable in volume to the -at the time- modern one. So if you wanted to go to the University, you had better learn your Greek/Latin well. So, even if ancient Greek is currently taught to all in high-school, students who want to study engineering or math in college, usually do the minimum and end up not learning much in those courses. But high school students who want to go into classics, literature, philology etc, will know the Latin and ancient Greek for this exam. They would find the particular test quite awkward though, as nowadays the focus is translating FROM Latin/ancient Greek, while this test is the reverse, although it tries to make it easy by translating most words for you.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
*wave* - over here.
I want to a public school that taught latin starting 5th year (i.e. when I was 11) and greek starting 10th year (pupils aged 16-17).
Ok, this is good old Europe, we're not being bred to become burger flippers. Maybe that's a point. And yes, it's not your average school, but it's neither an expensive place (free, in fact, just a regular public school) nor very special.
Education can be had if you want it (for your kids). But you do have to look around and make a good choice. It's not everywhere. And - and that's probably the main point - you have to have some yourself in order to understand how to make that choice.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nope (Score:5, Informative)
OT: That inscription is CREEPY, if you know all the symbolism behind it.
All the other cathedrals are expressions of some sort of artistry, or aspiration to heaven, or whatever.
St. Peter's is this imposing thing that says I am the Pope; I am the most powerful man on Earth; do as I say or suffer the consequences. And then there's that inscription -- "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church", said by Jesus, for those who don't know the Latin -- inscribed above the canopy where only the Pope can say Mass, as if to say "I am Peter's descendant as Pope, and Peter is Jesus' successor, so to slight me is to slight Jesus, so do what I say!"
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I'm a Harvard grad, and I can't answer any of the questions involving Greek and Latin translation on this test. I'm about 50% on the History and Geography section off the top of my head (i.e. without looking anything up), and the math sections look pretty trivial. All this proves is that we don't learn as much History and Geography these days, even at Harvard, and Greek and Latin simply aren't important parts of the average high school (or college) curriculum and are no longer considered mandatory k
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the whole thing speaks volumes to the disconnect between academia and reality. While an education in the high points of historical philosophy might be of limited use, much of that is pure nonsense intended to filter out undesirable applicants who, while quite capable of learning and performing, lack the "breeding" to be accepted. It was a great way to ensure that only like-minded people got degrees and continued the cycle.
Colleges have gotten a lot better in the past century, but they still spend a lot of time making sure you think how they want you to think, or at least can pretend to.
Disclaimer: I'm a college opt-out who was accepted to Harvard but didn't go (I applied just because I could). I decided there was a better way into the real world that the bullshit you have to endure at university. Take that how you want.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
I did go to school, just not Harvard. A year in university before dropping out and going to work, then three more semesters at other schools before deciding I was right to stay away.
diverging contours of cluefulness (Score:5, Interesting)
You haven't heard from *all* the drop-outs, have you? And many of the people who didn't drop out, but stayed in the system a little too long, are guilty of the converse Kool-Aid.
There have been an increasingly dire series of reports that many (expensive) post-graduate degree mills are steering their studious lemmings over a career cliff.
This as it becomes increasingly unclear why a person needs to pay big money for higher education in a world where it's hard to think up anything you can't find out about in 30 seconds or half an hour.
If I had stuck it out in math class and learned how to do the Laplace transform and other manipulations of the s-domain, it would have saved me a phone call or two to other people who stuck it out in math class. And even without the training, I can fill in the blanks cook-book style, and I have a pretty good idea what the s operator is all about. I'd be hard pressed to improvise, but how many people out there would you trust to improvise on the subject of analog filter design?
I'd also like to figure out the structure of the electromagnetic field in our measurement product, but none of the people I know who stuck it out in math/physics class can do it any better than I can. If we're determined to know the answer, we're going to have to use an electromagnetic field simulator.
Here's an example of the knuckle cracking involved just to warm up to the problem:
The Velocity Factor of an Insulated Two-Wire Transmission Line [princeton.edu]
But I'm sure Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse could scribble out the answer free hand on the back of his entrance exam, because it occurred to him while proving that "circles are to each other as the squares of their radii" that he had never constructed a Sierpinski curve that carpets the unit circle, and that lead to other things.
In my initial survey of computational options, I discovered MEEP, under the GPL, from MIT. Scheme/C++/Python front ends. I can do all that. Correctly setting up temperature and frequency dependent complex permitivities in several different bulk materials, and not missing out a crucial factor of 1/2 pi somewhere, I'd really want to have someone "educated" to check my work. On that little DIY proposition, I think just opening the box is a three day exercise. With another six years of formal math education, I could maybe even contribute some patches.
Kenneth Arrow [wikipedia.org]
I quote this all the time. And this is old school, already. I'm amazed at the resilience of mass pyramid schemes in the modern workforce. It works this way in pro sports. For every four kids with the talent to "make it big", three drop out due to injury, bad timing, or circumstance with little to show for it, while the kid who makes tenure with the big club reaps huge rewards; not even counting the untold hours invested by kids who dropped out far earlier in the process. The same evolution is taking place in academia these days: $30,000/year as a post-doc shifting test-tubes in some dank over-lit basement. Sign me up.
In the post-Arrow world, the relationship of education to knowledge or common sense is becoming ever more tenuous. I think Temple Grandin has been underemployed in modern curriculum design. On a bad day it feels like the fundamental economic output of the modern labour force is income disparity.
Gone are the days, it seems, that one could get by having the skills and personality to make a positive contribution to the world around us. Yet the opportunity to contribute, as gated by the availability of the core knowledge, has never been greater.
What the world needs is a way for bright kids to drop out of the overpriced educational treadmill without being suspected of having a chip on their shoulder. Or educated voters who give a damn, but the second item seems out of reach. (Is it just myth that back when education was rare, presidents spoke inte
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If I had stuck it out in math class and learned how to do the Laplace transform and other manipulations of the s-domain, it would have saved me a phone call or two to other people who stuck it out in math class.
So what you're saying is that somebody needs to take the class, which makes it pretty clear why we need it. Not to mention that I'm not entirely clear on how you would even know whether you would need to use a Laplace transform unless somebody who took all those classes informed you about it. Or somebody who took all those classes wrote the wikipedia page that you found. There are always people behind the knowledge you are searching, and these people need to learn it.
I'd also like to figure out the structure of the electromagnetic field in our measurement product, but none of the people I know who stuck it out in math/physics class can do it any better than I can. If we're determined to know the answer, we're going to have to use an electromagnetic field simulator.
People who stuck it out in physics wi
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Who needs to suffer through academia when there's plenty of blue-collar jobs that pay a lot out there?
EXCELLENT!
I've been looking for a good quote to show people in the "jobs going over seas" threads. This way when blue collar workers are complaining about their salaries/jobs going over seas, I can reference this which shows either the mentality of their compatriots, or even themselves.
Blue collar workers who passed up the opportunity for higher learning, and still continue to pass it up (eg, refuse to go back), despite the fact that the price of their labour is decreasing, to amounts they can't afford, res
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Colleges have gotten a lot better in the past century, but they still spend a lot of time making sure you think how they want you to think, or at least can pretend to.
That's pretty much the purpose of schooling as a whole, at least in theory. Why would you seek an education, if not to learn how to think? I can dig up facts and figures any time I want, as long as I know how to research; what schools should be teaching is the ability to put those facts together into a cohesive model, and apply them to the real world. If anything, I think schools should put more emphasis on teaching students how to think and research, and less time focusing on rote memorization.
As an asi
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Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a substantial difference between teaching you to reason and teaching you reason in the same way as other academics, inevitably reaching mostly the same conclusions. It is not without reason that academics have been accused of living disconnected from the real world, having convinced themselves that their highly theoretical model of how the world works actually reflects reality. Or perhaps ideological models is the right word, most working men have a more pragmatic approach.
Then again, I'm not so worried about academic people out of touch. Far worse are the career politicians that have never had a "normal" job in their life, all they've done is to work for political organizations. They have some very funny ideas about how the world runs plus an overinflated ego about their own importance. They only decide how to split the cake, they're not the ones baking it.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea behind a liberal arts education is to become a well-rounded person, with a (hopefully) better understanding and appreciation of the world around you.
This is something that is sorely missing in the vast majority of the population today, thanks to the transactional view of education. The idea of applicability to real life is something that was perpetuated by the likes of corporations, who needed skilled people but did not want to train. In fact, until fairly recently, companies offered training programs outside of your acceptance, and it was a given that you would learn those skills when you joined a company. These days, that is passe.
Colleges have become trade schools, and are expected to teach trades that are applicable to a job, with little else. Except for a handful of top notch schools, the vast majority lack depth in what they teach. This lack of appreciation and understanding stretches to both the sciences and engineering as well as the arts and humanities. No one wants to learn computer science, they want to learn programming. No one wants to learn the philosophy of morality, they want to get a law degree. No one wants to learn how to paint or understand the fundamentals of the visual arts; they would much rather learn "animation" and "game design" join a design studio.
The unfortunate side effect is that this is a shift in perception, one from when people wanted to be well rounded and enlightened, to one where people merely want to learn a skill and make money.
And if you think that historical philosophy is not enlightening, or even applicable to the real world, you are missing out on some of the greatest thinkers that this world has ever produced.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Informative)
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of course we also train a lot more people too (both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population). In practice the details of law, and the depth of knowledge that define a law degree are no less than that required to define the philosophy of morality. The few that truly grasp the latter in addition to the former can become professors. Everyone else just gets a law degree.
The more complex the world the more time needs to be spent to understand it at any level. I don't think schools lack dep
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Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
"The unfortunate side effect is that this is a shift in perception, one from when people wanted to be well rounded and enlightened, to one where people merely want to learn a skill and make money."
The problem is there is too much people want to experience today and too much work. Over the centuries education as we know it was not a requirement for existence. Over the last few hundred years public schools were invented to deal with the demands of the industrial revolution. You have to understand the very origin of schooling for the masses. What you're talking about is schooling for the elite, the people who could afford to be learned. People who had enough money/sheer interest to enjoy education for it's own sake.
The educational requirements today just to exist keep going up and hence this is why universities are flooded with applicants who want skills for money. It's the natural outgrowth of needing more and more just to earn a living, or at least it is from societies perspective whether it is true or not.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
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Places like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, more often than not, is more about getting to learn the right people rather than just subjects. Some people people try to network/schmooze a million other people in some pathetic attempt to advance, going to these schools allows you access to colleague that will be in the advanced ranks in coming years and have them see you as one of their own.
Right now, most SC justices are from Yale/Harvard despite the fact that most SC justices historically never even graduated from
Origins of our Culture (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the whole thing speaks volumes to the disconnect between academia and reality.
Your post, and the fact that you are rated as "insightful" speaks volumes to the shift that has occurred. Your statement, and the rest of your post, where you claim that "...an education in the high points of historical philosophy might be of limited use..." speak volumes of a profound poverty of mind, where education and the search for truth is predicated in material gain. This intellectual poverty forms us into individual intellectual islands floating through time, neither looking backwards nor forwards. We are separated from the origins of our society, our culture, our values. We forget that our society was modelled after ancient Greece. Ideas such as private property, money, justice, freedom of speech, constitutional government all come from ancient Greece, and were refined and developed by the Romans (at least during certain periods of Roman history).
Before you write off classical education, read Plato's "The Apology", where you start to see the beginnings of the ethical underpinnings of our modern world. Read Plato's Gorgias, where Socrates carries on a debate about many issues that still rings true today. See if you can see in this quote a great summation of the modern field of advertising and public relations in his statement about "oratory":
Socrates: The same is true about the orator and oratory relative to the other crafts, too, then. Oratory doesn't need to have any knowledge of the state of their subject matters; it only needs to have discovered some device to produce persuasion in order to make itself appear to those who don't have knowledge that it knows more than those who actually do have it. Plato - Gorgias - 459c
Reading the first volume of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" has given me a great appreciation for how civilizations develop and change, and about how valuable our current stable democratic systems are. When you look at long succession of Roman emperors who were all removed by various methods of murder, you start to realize the value of electing leaders.
When you speak of the "disconnect between academia and reality", I think you minimize the work of centuries of great thinkers. When you look at the world logically, you begin to realize that it is very strange. You start to realize your own limitations. It gives you a sense of humility, both for yourself and for the poor sods who think they have figured it all out. You start to realize what pathetic creatures we are, how we weave illusion upon illusion. It is the way we are, and the best we can do is to try to understand the world. However, we should never believe that we have "figured it all out", because when we do that, we effectively stop thinking. Socrates said that "as for me, all I know is that I know nothing". He spent his life questioning and seeking knowledge, but he always remembered his limitations.
Education cannot simply be about utility. It has to also be about making us more complete as human beings. It should help us in our search for wisdom and truth in the world. Socrates said that "the unconsidered life is not worth living." When you do not consider the purpose and meaning of your own life, you become a football, being kicked around in someone else's game.
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The exam was probably a little easier than it appears. The three translation questions are all out of classic literature (Greek, not Latin), and they give you most of the words, so it's likely largely a matter of having memorized the translations of those phrases and (failing that) knowing Latin declensions and conjugations. The various
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Even if you weren't travelling or conducting business in Britain itself, 1869 was pretty damn close to the height of the British empire, and you would certainly be conducting trade with them. London was a centre of finance with greater weight in global commerce than even New York today, so it's not surprising to find an interest calculation in pounds.
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On top of that, I'm not sure the demographics are even remotely comparable either. The college-for-the-masses thing in the US didn't really start until after WW2. In the 1890s, high school wasn't even mandatory yet for most of the country; checking wiki (history of education in the united states) that didn't happen until decades later, and initially it was only mandatory to age 14. In 1890 there were only 200,000 high school students. Period. In the entire country. And that's a few decades after the given t
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it was unlikely to be the "this test is geared such that if you don't get at least 90% of the points, you have failed to master it enough" that we use today for the more serious stuff like college admissions
It always surprises me that the US makes the grade boundaries so high. It seems to be a sort of anti-elitism. The difference between a perfect student and a passing student is only 10%. The exams end up containing lots of filler questions, which no one who was awake for the exam could get wrong and then just a small number that actually separate the students.
In my university, a pass was 40%, and the top grade was 70% or above. The spread for the top students is greater than the spread for all of the
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I'm not sure I understand why some people here are getting so defensive about it. The article never claims that we should go back to using that test, it is simply presented as a historical curiosity and might invite one to reflect on the standards of today; particularly for me it brings up the balance between the liberal arts and the more vocational paths taken by engineering programs like mine.
I'm not ashamed I can't pass it. Well, I am a little bit, because I fail the Latin sections miserably and took 3
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True, by our standards the math portion of their test would be simple by the standards of anyone applying to Harvard (and seriously expecting to get in), where top tier students are learning advanced calculus in high school. It's interesting that although history and geography haven't changed much, our focus is very different, being far less focused on ancient history and far more focused on the past few hundred years (including, in the US, events occurring shortly before 1869!).
I suspect candidates back th
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet it's interesting to note that they were expected to know Greek and Latin from high school (or equivalent.)
There was also a much greater emphasis on Geography back then. Nowadays that's an optional course.
Math is an optional course today. Last I heard my former HS is only requiring one year to graduate, pathetic.
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Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
They learn that Heather has two mommies, that Islam is a religion of peace, hurt feelings run the world, and how to throw all of that into a inspirational powerpoint presentation.
Modern School is nothing more than a giant social engineering program that is failing our kids.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)
And before any of you think that the PowerPoint presentation is in jest - I've got a client who's son is in grade 7 this year. He has to purchase the school "blessed" laptop and in return must run Microsoft Office 2010 (they heavily use OneNote, which has no alternative, free or otherwise), as well as the Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection.
Now, this suite of Adobe software retails for over $4k here (sure, there's a massive edu discount) but I can't believe they're being taught this when in school I learned BASIC and LOGO.
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If you want to see more of that and less "social engineering", then more money should be put into them.
Also it's worth realizing that most places in 1869 didn't even *have* public schools. An eighth-grade education was quite sufficient for an agrarian economy mostly reliant on unskilled or blue-collar labor.
Most kids today really do k
Problem is where, not how much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, Biology including evolution, Astronomy, Chemistry; Algebra, Trigonometry, Calculus; Computer programming; Print shop, metal shop, and actual knowledge about health. If you want to see more of that and less "social engineering", then more money should be put into them.
The US spending per student is already comparable to the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Israel, etc. Perhaps the problem is not the current spending level but how/where it is being spent?
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.PRIM.PC.ZS/countries/1W?display=default [worldbank.org]
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Watch waiting for Superman, they show you some of the issues with the US educational system.
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Comparing just life expectancy for 20 year-olds, in 1850 a young man could expect to live to 60.1.
http://gcanyon.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/life-expectancy-in-the-1800s-not-as-bad-as-reported/ [wordpress.com]
19 year old kid would likely live to 60. Problem was reaching 19 due to early childhood deaths (under age 10). Typical of misunderstanding of how life expectancy works.
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Wow, you should talk to your school board. Around here, they teach math, science, history, literature and composition, and various elective courses including the various shop classes, art, music, home economics, and varoius others.
My sister (who is graduating this year) never mentioned a class on how many mommies Heather has. Even in Oklahoma, it doesn't take a whole semester to tell them "two". She didn't take any comparative religion courses or classes on hurt feelings, so maybe those were electives.
Sh
Practical/vocational math classes (Score:3)
If they don't need the knowledge, then forcing them to memorize it (which they would likely soon forget due to the fact that it isn't important to them) would be rather useless and counterproductive, would it not? I'd say some of the more advanced math classes should indeed be optional because many people won't really use the knowledge.
I would not advocate that everyone take college prep math classes. What I would advocate is that everyone take some sort of math class. Schools should have two math tracks, college prep and practical/vocational, and a student should be taking classes in one or the other. This is not an original idea, I'm basically describing what my grandmother told me about HS in her day. The practical/vocational classes included things like balancing a checkbook, calculating interest on a loan, calculating a bill with cre
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Math isn't really universal. I'm taking courses to teach English abroad, and the one thing that keeps coming up is that math is not a universal language. Most people do not study it anywhere near long enough to get to the point where they can genuinely communicate everything they need to about a situation using mathematical symbols. And many people have a diminished capacity for such reasoning anyways.
Things which one takes for granted such as the order of numbers are hardly universal, there isn't an innate
Re:Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the OP may refer to the fact that above some small number (5-6 or thereabouts) we no longer have a preconscious sense or relative magnitude. If you put one set of five objects and one set with six objects, you can immediately, unthinkingly point out which set is the larger one. And so can anybody, including children with not a day of education, and even some other animals (their limit may differ of course).
With 10 and 12 objects, you need to count. More to the point, you need to learn how to do so. You can longer rely on any kind of automatic perceptual or cognitive ability to do so.
different time (Score:3)
Ah yes, the education of that day, based on assumptions that are still present in some form today.
Might have been a more refined age, though for today I'm pretty sure your average CS major needs to be able to quote Dante in his original language about as much as he needs an extra heavy bender prior to the big test.
Re:different time (Score:5, Insightful)
Please tell me you're kidding. Latin != Italian.
And for that matter, heaven forbid that college should be about getting an education instead of necessary vocational training. Clearly knowledge is worthless except as a bullet on a résumé.
hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
I feel certain there was no rule forbidding the use of calculators.
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What was Soylent Green then?
lol@Exam [hint:joke] (Score:5, Funny)
Man, if the examiner had been smart he'd written page 3-4 in LaTeX and saved himself a lot of handwriting!!!!
Educational standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Could any of us pass the exam today?
Well, the theory of relativity, evolution, anything about computers, most modern medicine, etc., would be straight out because they didn't exist then. And I doubt many people here would disagree that knowing how to use a computer and a basic understanding of physics something every college would want in its students. It's no use trying to test ourselves according to the standards of over a hundred years ago... we know so much more about the world it's not even fair. The smartest person of that era would look like a total idiot today just trying to get by with what we take for granted -- driving a car, using a cell phone, browsing the internet, etc.
Re:Educational standards (Score:5, Informative)
If your idea is that the average person alive today -- never mind the average high school student -- has any knowledge at all of relativistic mechanics, evolutionary biology, computer science/engineering, medical science, etc., I think you'll find you're sadly mistaken. Yes, the average teenager knows how to use a cell phone. Clearly this is an insurmountable obstacle, and Isaac Newton himself would be unable to figure out my Nokia.
At any rate, the material on the "arithmetic" and "algebra" sections is still taught and used in schools today, and I'll outright guarantee you that if I printed those out and took them to a Calculus III section at the local university I'd be unlikely to get a very high pass rate, despite the fact that most of them have memorized how to take dozens of integrals or apply Lagrange multipliers.
Knowledge isn't worth as much as people seem to think; at its heart, it's just trivia. What matters is the ability to think, and that doesn't change from generation to generation.
Re:Educational standards (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, here's a revision. With a week's training, I'll bet the 1869 man could drive a car, use a cell phone, or browse the internet. Could you, with a week's training, learn algebra, geometry, trig, history (in depth), geography, Latin and Greek? The two sets of tests aren't equivalent. (Sorry, I'm being a bit unfair. You did mention relativity, evolution, computers, medicine. But relativity isn't taught in high school. Evolution is a simple and obvious concept. Medicine, beyond the germ theory of disease and other easy bits, isn't taught in high school. That leaves computers.
The obvious lack in the old test is science, there should have been something on agriculture or animal husbandry, or medicine or astronomy.
The obvious "We don't care" for modern times is Greek and Latin.
The sad lack in modern education is history. One reason our modern politics is so thoroughly screwed up is that a high quality understanding of history has been lost to the general population for a century.
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With a week's training, I'll bet the 1869 man could drive a car, use a cell phone, or browse the internet.
I'll take that bet. Try teaching 70-years-old people to drive a car, use a cellphone or browse the internet. Then remember they're people that saw those technologies be born and mature in front of their eyes throughout the years, while the 1869 man is not.
In fact, I'd bet if you took a hundred volunteers to teach a hundred 1869 men to do those things, after a week at least half your groups would've seen casualties from the 1869 man killing either himself or his teacher on account of the alleged "satanism",
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Poor example. I wish someone had taught you the basics of statistics in school -- your selection group is awful. 70 year old people, really? Have you looked at the scope of cognitive development in a 70 year old?
Assuming you take a normal age group, your assumption is blatantly false. You've clearly not worked with refugees, or people from societies that have not seen or used modern devices. My wife (who, incidentally, goes to Harvard) volunteers with healthy policy organizations. She works with people peop
Re:Educational standards (Score:4, Insightful)
I was looking hard to see if anyone had a glimpse of why greek and latin are important to education. You almost nailed it.
We've lost the art of teaching of how to think. The gentlemanly Greek and Latin were taught towards skills in reading texts, not in conversing to Joe Greek on the street about how he feels today; the pupil is then empowered to read many great and early works documenting the foundation and thought, and its progression, that form the fundamentals of our knowledge in philosophy, government, sciences and mathematics. Reading the literature of the time in the original source language conveys the subtext much more fluidly, thus enabling full comprehension. Individual languages are colored by the culture speaking it: Much is lost in translation. If you are to understand how to think, and achieve parity with where we have already tread in thought, then you need to understand first-hand how we arrived at the present knowledge, complete with the traps and tangents, not just the right answer. You learn how temporary some right answers are, giving you the humility and perspective to grow beyond the works of mankind thus far.
Re:You got it (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything, higher formal education is less important now than it was in years gone by. Today, the complex, information based, place we live in allows one to learn about anything on demand, in seconds. Unless your interests are purely academic, you don't need the full background of a given study crammed into a short time period to solve problems in the real world. Like someone commented earlier, knowledge is just trivia; being able to think is all that matters.
What really happened is that the universities found the appeal in money. More students equals more income. The lure of higher incomes advertised on false premises attracted people in droves. One of the best marketing campaigns to date, in my opinion.
University is a fantastic place for one to pursue their passions in the study of a given topic, but to say more schooling is needed to survive outside of academia seems a little misguided. I do agree that you can never stop learning; if university is the only place you can learn, more power to you.
PDF Files? (Score:5, Funny)
I find it hard to believe they had PDF files in 1869.
My grandpa could have passed this; I don't need to (Score:3)
After utterly failing the Latin and Greek sections, I think I'd get a pretty bad reputation with any reviewer, even though I could do the rest just fine with a slide rule. Of course, I could follow up the geometry section with a lovely essay relating the theories of computability, genetics, and medicine, and the reviewer would be equally confused.
The parts that are important in modern innovation are still certainly appropriate for an entrance exam. The only difference I see between this and a modern exam is that the Latin and Greek sections have been replaced by English tests and some basic science questions. After all, the purpose for knowing Latin was that is was supposed to be the universal language of scholars, and during the burst of scientific progress following WWII, English took a firm grasp of that role.
If you ain't moving.... (Score:5, Insightful)
With the exception of the arithmetic, logarithms and trigonometry, algebra and plane geometry, not a chance in Hell.
Now, how well would a prospective applicant fare with some of today's knowledge? Introductory quantum mechanics can be taught at the high-school level. Now someone out Victorian era and give them the mathematical equations and they would fail due to not having the conceptual foundation to understand it.
Hold onto your seat for the big reveal: Knowledge advances over time, but correspondingly, some knowledge is made obsolescent. How well would any of do at knapping flint knives and spears? You might make a passable one, but not one that would qualify as a quality tool in the Paleolithic era.
Progress, folks. It's a good thing.
Tricky, but aimed at a specific type of knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm two weeks away from a master's degree in Ancient Greek. I'm not sure I'd pass the Greek portion of the exam. Why? Because it focuses on extremely rigorous memorization of obscure details (and I'm talking obscure details of an arcane dead language, mind you). I can read even difficult Greek pretty well, but that doesn't mean I can decline 'trirs' (a noun in a highly unusual declension), or form the correctly-accented participles of 'histmi', or decline much of anything in the unusual dual number, off the top of my head and without consulting a grammar. Nor, I think, could most of my colleagues. The translation *into* Greek, however, is quite easy. It's a hard test for college freshmen, to be sure, but it's also testing based on a very different sort of educational objective. Passing the Greek section requires more memorization than actual competence in the language.
Latin answers (Score:4, Informative)
Translation:
1. Me non refero quam divitem esse Gygen. (Unsure how to decline 'Gyges' but we'll go with that for accusative. I guess it's a Greek paradigm.)
2. Quis clarior Graeciae quam Themostecles? Quis, cum in exilium expelleretur, injuriam suae patriae ingratae non tulit, sed idem quod ante viginti annos Coriolanus fecisset?
3. Primo veris venit consul ad Ephesum, et militibus ab Scipio acceptis apud milites contionem habuit, in qua, virtute sua collaudata, adhortabatur ad novum bellum cum Gallis suspicandum, qui (ut inquit) Antiochum auxiliis iuverunt. (I left in 'ut inquit' and 'in qua' although they were meant to be omitted. I wondered if the last bit should be infinitive/accusative construction due to indirect speech, however I think 'ut' demands the indicative.)
Grammar:
You could copy this out of Wheelock so I don't see the point of reproducing it here.
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Me is the accusative, you either use the nominative ego or you don't use the subject at all (it is understood by conjugation of refero). Also, verb should be last in sentences (usual, though no rule). Vale.
Money, motivation, and prestige in 1869 (Score:3)
Two things bear heavily on the difficulty of being admitted to a school:
1) The reputation of the school at the time of application.
2) The pool of qualified students with the means to attend.
1869 was a time when most people in the US made their living through manual labor or subsistence farming. Neither occupation offers the means or the motivation for higher education.
And I have to wonder just how prestigious the Ivy League schools were in 1869. This was just 90 years after the revolution. I expect that "schooled in Europe" carried more weight than any kind of degree from Harvard. What did it take to get into Cambridge in 1869?
Re:Money, motivation, and prestige in 1869 (Score:4, Interesting)
And I have to wonder just how prestigious the Ivy League schools were in 1869.
It is worth noting, in this context, that Harvard once offered the chair of astronomy to Galileo. They've been around for longer than most think. At the time, of course, admission was much more predicated on pedigree than intelligence, but then again a good pedigree is actually a reasonable first estimate of intelligence.
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A good pedigree is a reasonable first estimate of education.
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Vs today, political motivations, class filtering (Score:3)
surely the vast majority of Harvard applicants would fail this test. Greek and Latin or quite depreciated. Simply replace those languages with equivalent questions in relevant modern languages or subjects.
One strong point of modern college is that language classes have be depreciated for fields they have no bearing. A robotics or CS major will have zero use for latin or greek or really any language other than english.
On the other hand, Latin is an immensely useful language if you are planning a major in any romance language. Latin Italian but knowing Latin gets you Italian at an 80% discount, Spanish at 70% and French at 60% . Its learning 4 languages for the price of 2. Greek is pretty much useless in this regard, not many languages have a Greek base that isn't already covered by greek>latin loan words.
As other people have mentioned, some of the exam was politically driven. It had some ulterior motive built in to exclude those of a lesser social class. Sure, greek and latin had more value in education at that time but not so much that a business degree required such knowledge, especially greek.
you're all liars (Score:5, Insightful)
Predictably, half the comments here reply, "Oh, wow, this test is easy except the Latin/Greek because that's not important!"
Well, bullshit on all counts.
(1) The purpose of learning Latin and ancient Greek is not to enable you to speak Latin and ancient Greek. They've already been dead languages for millennia and they were arguably even more dead then (Greece being even less relevant). It's an exercise in the study of language and of foundations of European culture and literature. You don't get the same experience by learning "Japanese for anime fans".
Anyway, I "aced" Latin at school - that sort of thing was something I enjoyed and came reasonably naturally. Many years later, I have forgotten enough of it that I could not do a good job of these questions. The translations into Latin would today leave me hopeless without a dictionary. What is more, these aren't trivial Latin beginner questions.
(2) History/geography - at least some people are admitting that they don't know some of these, though I see a lot of "oh about half". Really? Did you actually sit down with that sheet and no references and write detailed geographical and historical answers? Did you then go one by one checking at the end that they were all correct? Or did you just think "oh yeah I've heard of that before" and sneak in a "check" to Wikipedia, confirming knowledge you didn't really have to mind?
The subject of my masters thesis was the history of an area of mathematics; background reading required me to be familiar with specific areas of classical Greek and Roman history. I enjoyed History at high school, though none of it was classical. Latin class included a certain amount of Roman history surrounding Pliny the Younger and Virgil, with an earlier school covering the historical context of the Odyssey and the Iliad. And yet I don't think I could do justice to any of the essay-type questions. "Pericles - the Man and his Policy" - really? Are even a significant minority claiming they even know more than a sentence or two about Pericles?
(3) The maths section. Oh, what a surprise, everyone is claiming that the maths section is trivial. Well, bullshit again. I have a postgrad mathematical education and, yes, I can probably answer these questions. But I would have to think about the plane geometry proofs (which, it is likely, the candidate would be expected to have simply memorised for this test) - I can't recite all of them off the top of my head and I bet I'd stumble on some details for some of them if I were to actually write the answers all out rather than just wave my hand over the paper dismissively and say "this is easy".
What is more, you annoying geeks, there were no electronic calculators in the mid-19th century. You know what this means? It means that half the challenge is doing the arithmetic quickly and without mistakes. And, whether by reading original Leibniz or the speling errors on /., there is one reassuring thing I have come to know (I am reassured because I do it myself and thought I was the only one): numerate geeky types make lots of trivial mistakes. A good mathematician - perhaps the sort who is intuitively familiar with geometry - might make a bad doctor or accountant, i.e. may fail in a profession where speed and accuracy with numbers is important.
Whenever I visit Slashdot and there's a topic where people have the chance to put their knowledge to the test, I always see a huge number of people claiming that they did wonderfully at the test. And yet, in real life, hardly anyone ever performs at such superheroic levels, whether dumb, average or intelligent. This isn't because /. isn't full of super-geniuses - even though it isn't - it's because the sheer amount of information accessible in the world today means that everyone necessarily specialises a great deal. No particular random test which has not been prepared for is likely to fit the knowledge of a random sample of even fairly bright individuals.
I guess it's just a predictabl
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I guess it's just a predictable defence mechanism. Some moderately intelligent types at school used to do it: each time they'd finished a test, they'd proudly announce to everyone (particularly those who they regarded as competitors) how easy it was; telling them the answers to all the questions they were confident about. You know what? This sort of person never reached the top. That place was reserved to (i) the quietly confident - the real genius types who had no insecurity they needed to make up for; and (ii) the fairly talented who also happened to be extremely hard-working (and had no time for such nonsense).
I always found it amusing when someone said the test was easy. Because of course, they'd never get it all right.
Actually, the people who annoyed me the most were the ones who'd go "oh, it was really difficult, I think I might have barely passed" and ended up getting 100% anyway. Humble motherfuckers.
Re:Would they do the same exams again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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To be fair, there weren't exactly a whole lot of science back then.
Do you really believe that?
Plus much of the scientific knowledge in 1869 were available exclusively in Latin, hence the emphasis on the "dead language".
1869 not 1689.
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Let's see... 1869?
Oh, that just leaves classical mechanics, much of calculus, much of linear algebra, some thermodynamics, some electromagnetism (I won't blame them for not thinking about Maxwell's equations, which were introduced just 8 years prior and were rather obscure in their time)... Could go on.
Nah, it's not that there wasn't a whole lot of science at the end of the XIXth century, it's just that much of the science was done after you'd get in the university. You didn't have baseline education much f
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To be fair, there weren't exactly a whole lot of science back then.
There was a lot of incredibly important science going on back then. It just wasn't in the same areas as now, and it wasn't expected to be studied heavily before college.
To give a taste of what was going on scientifically:
* Biology was in the middle of radical developments, as Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was getting developed, while Gregor Mendel's was quietly developing genetics.
* In geography, there had recently been the establishment of the Prime Meridian going through Greenwich and international
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I guess it would all depend on the time scale. If you set a laptop down in front of him(and they were all males back then) and said, "Send me an email in the next 5 minutes stating your name and major" then yes, he would fail. However if you gave him a day and allowed him unlimited access to the laptop then he might be able send one. Critical thinking skills are pretty timeless, a
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But the point is, TFA is bull, the curricula is irrelevant, we are not smarter or stupider today than 142 years ago.
Actually, the data seems to show that the average IQ has increased quite a bit since then. Of course, this is probably due to the increase in abstract thinking abilities amongst the populace on the lower end of the scale, but it certainly does suggest that, as a people, we are more intelligent today than 142 years ago.
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Re:re Maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Latin is critical to the web today ... (Score:5, Insightful)
What use is Latin and Greek today?
Latin is very important today, especially with respect to the web. Have you tried to come up with a short decent sounding company name that is both trademark-able and has an available .com domain? I found it easier to accomplish with Latin than English, Perpenso [perpenso.com].
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Not to mention the incessant use of Latin by people who spend far too much time arguing on the internet. Some people seem to think that the use of Latin somehow validates their point.
Re:re Maybe (Score:5, Informative)
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The reason for Latin and Greek being required is that it was believed up until sometime in the 20th that knowing those languages in particular would make a person smarter. Basically the brain would grow strong by having to contort to handle those languages.
We know now, that it's not really the case that the benefits of learning Latin or Greek are not inherent to either of those languages anymore than any other languages a person might learn beyond the first.
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Don't forget that many English words are derived from Latin and Greek words or stems. Learning both of those languages effectively expands your English vocabulary.
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When did you stop beating your wife?
What is the proper answer?
I managed to reach 5th grade without knowing how to "properly" divide, when by the school's standards at the time I attended elementary school, I should have been able master it by 4th grade. I managed by sequential subtraction to arrive at the right answer. But again, I never had to take group theory or elementary statistics in 12th grade like my children did.
TFA is bunk. Are multiple-choice exams killing intellectual progress? Is it better to k
Apparently you fail in reading comprehension (Score:5, Informative)
True, the ink stamp on the documents is 1899, which is likely to be the date they were added to the Harvard library. You will note it is stamped on top of the content on each page and is clearly not part of the original page.
However, at the bottom of each page it gives the date as 1869. This date appears to be part of the original page.
Apparently you failed to read each page completely. One fundamental rule of all examinations: read the questions fully. That hasn't changed.
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"To circumscribe a circle about a given triangle."
locate the center-point of each leg of the triangle with a compass, and plot a line perpendicular to each, thus locating the center of the triangle at the intersection of these lines. Then, use the compass to plot the circle the center-point of the circle being the same as that of the triangle, and the radius of the circle being the distance from that pont to a Vertex of the triangle. beginning at any Vertex of the triangle, circumscribe the circle about the triangle, returning to the same vertex the circl
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I admit, I struggled a bit with the polynomials as I don't work much with them anymore, I still don't see any direct application for them even after years of working in scientific computing. Therefore, I see them as a graduation test only, meaning "If we can force you to learn this, then we can force you to learn anything.".
Just for that you fail the exam.
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I did three years of latin at school, from age 11-14 (in the UK), although no greek. I'd say it was one of the more useful subjects that I learned. When I learn any romance language, it's relatively easy to pick up words because I can understand their derivations, so I can often guess the correct meaning for new works that I encounter. Latin lessons also had a far more formal treatment of grammar than English (or French or German) lessons, which was useful both for learning to write correct English and w