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Harvard's 1899 Entrance Exam [pdf]
- bobwebb 15y agoI've just applied to university, and it's interesting to see how the maths questions have changed. For example, there are a lot of questions on calculating fractions. Nowadays this would no time at all to work out (put it in a calculator), but back then you would be expected to be able to calculate it mentally, with written notes. It's strange how as the technology used to solve mathematical problems changes, the ways in which mathematical ability is measured changes too.
- azazo 15y agoThe stamp says 1899, but it says 1869 at the bottom of each page. Is it actually from 1869?
- jbermudes 15y agoThe test is from 1869, but the stamp indicates that it was placed in the archive in 1899.
- ddol 15y agoIt's fascinating to think that in 1869 there were Transatlantic telegraph links. One could have sat this entrance exam in London while it was being sat in MA simultaneously, with Questions/Answers transmitted digitally.
- tokenadult 15y agoWhat was the bandwidth of that telegraph link? And what were the clerical procedures for passing message text from a sending client to the telegraph operator at the sending end, and from the the telegraph operator to the recipient at the receiving end? Just how simultaneous was communication after the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was laid? Much faster than any ship, surely, but fast enough (and inexpensive enough for most people?) for cheating on a Harvard entrance examination?
- noonespecial 15y agoFirst contact was made in 1858, but the cable failed in mere days. The first reliable link happened in 1866. It ran about half "telegraph speed", which was pretty darn slow. I'd hate to connect to that bbs. It's a fascinating read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
- robflynn 15y agoSlow, but amazing at the same time. I love thinking about things like this. I remember someone calling my old BBS, back in the early 90s, with a TDD to see what would happen. That explained why I had been seeing 300bps callers when I was used to seeing 1200bps-2400bps. I recall one holiday starting the download of a picture of a bear. I then went and had Thanksgiving dinner with my family for about two hours. I arrived home just in time for the picture to finish downloading. :P
- noonespecial 15y agoI completely remember those gifs coming in one agonizing line after the other, except mine were... uuh.. Also bears.
- ricefield 15y agoMakes the SAT look like a joke...
- idlebullshit 15y agoThe SAT is a joke.
- marvindanig 15y agoTotally.
- zackattack 15y agoAnd it is, to many Harvard grads.
- Lost_BiomedE 15y agoThis doesn't look too bad. But, like any test, it would depend on the time limit and one's expectations going in.
- jclaassen 15y agoAm I just being an engineer, or is the math way easier than the rest of this test?
- Animus7 15y agoProbably. Coming from the same perspective, I agree. I'd say some of it is pointlessly tedious, though, such as the one with manual division.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nopassrecover 15y agoMy maths is relatively weak, and I found the maths component trivially easy. Perhaps mathematics had a smaller part to play in society at this stage, because asking a university level student what a prime number is or how to do long division seems trivial.
- lkozma 15y agoDoing cube root by hand is more tricky though.
- derleth 15y agoI'd characterize it as 'pointless tedium' and I'm glad our educational system is rid of it. It's easier to justify teaching Latin than that drudgery.
- light3 15y agoOf course if you're doing it by trial and error on paper it is pointless tedium. But I'm sure that the point of doing these exercises were not bore you to death, but to really make you understand arithmetic so you can do most given problems faster. If all you knew was how to multiply and divide numbers by hand, that problem would take you hours to solve! A great example is the section 'lucky numbers' in Feynman's book: http://lib.ru/ANEKDOTY/FEINMAN/feinman_engl.txt http://lib.ru/ANEKDOTY/FEINMAN/feinman_engl.txt
- schrototo 15y agoLike all tests, it's not hard if you know the stuff that's asked. If you've studied ancient greek in school, that part of the test is probably as easy for you as the algebra part must seem to anyone who went to school in the past couple of decades (it looks about as hard as math homework from when I was 15 or so). edit: It's interesting. I do have a certain romantic attachment to this kind of classic humanist education, e.g. it irks me that the history and geography section has me floundered and I'm somewhat sorry that I didn't have the drive to do better in Latin in school. But then I think, there's so much other interesting things to know and experience. At times when I wish I could read Cicero's Orationes In Catilinam in its original form, I need to remind myself that I can read and understand, say, this little piece of genius: fib = 1 : 1 : [ a+b | (a,b) <- zip fib (tail fib) ]
- fhars 15y agoBut to become a fully erudite member of modern society, you might want to also study zipWith :: (a-> b -> c) -> [a] -> [b] -> [c] :-)
- aristidb 15y agoAllowing one to simplify to: fibs = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs) Involving zip`ap`tail, the Aztec god of consecutive numbers: fibs = 1 : 1 : (zipWith (+) `ap` tail) fibs Or, pointlessly: fix $ (1:) . (1:) . (zipWith (+) `ap` tail)
- Typhon 15y agoThey give almost all the words. I've had harder Latin tests. The history stuff is weirdly worded. Probably the hardest part of the test.
- Gatsky 15y agoHurray for algebra! Still as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago. Are programming languages going to be equally durable?
- oskarkv 15y agoThat's the goal of Arc. :)
- jules 15y agoIt would have to become relevant first though. I conjecture that no programming language alive now is going to be relevant in 100 years. If you look at the history of programming languages, this is not at all a bold conjecture.
- cema 15y agoLisp, Fortran, Cobol have all been used and working, in one form or another, for more than 50 years. Algol, on the other hand, has evolved into a great family of languages. Not unlike Latin, if I might say so.
- tokenadult 15y agoAlgebra reached its current durable form after centuries of development out of the verbally posed form it was in in the writings of Al-Khwarizmi. So hurrah for letters for unknown quantities (and the convention that "variables" are represented by one set of letters, usually, while "constants" are represented by a distinct set of letters, usually) and hurrah for explicit symbols for arithmetic operations. (I would also say hurrah for Descartes and analytic geometry, which does a lot to make algebra more comprehensible for many visual learners.)
- andjones 15y agoThis test shows what was valued - at least at Harvard - in the late 1800's. Greek and Latin were more important, as well as knowledge of geography of the known world and algebra and geometry. Algebra and geometry, I feel, are still important today (see SAT). Greek and Latin are less important, although they are still in the background. The humanities have changed and we now learn about more modern authors / topics and the humanities classes in general have cooler names (i.e. Microcomputer Application in Kinesiology or Topics in African Society and Culture). There's probably some bigger point I'm missing here like "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it" or something similar. Teaching kids about how to conjugate Latin verbs or some other rote activity always seemed pointless to me. Perhaps I'm preaching to the choir, but learning about entrepreneurship or practicing selling things would have been much more useful to me than many of the things I learned in high school or undergrad.
- cdavid 15y agoLatin is and most likely already was in the XIXth century a tool to discriminate people, which is one of the role of education (even more so in the XIXth century maybe ?). There are at least two ways to look at education from a purely economical POV: signal theory (I take someone from Harvard because he was able to go to Harvard) vs human capital theory (I take someone from Harvard because of the things he learned at Harvard). Of course, there are still many more aspects to it: I take someone at Harvard because he met people at Harvard... and I am myself coming from Harvard, etc... More simply, I am glad most of what I have learned was "useless" in some sense. What's useful or not changes in times, you cannot necessarily know what's useful to you when you're 15, and you could argue that one of the role of education is to teach you things you will never see otherwise (to expand your horizon).
- cma 15y agoNot likely, definitely. Veblen wrote about Latin being used for that purpose in 1898 in The Theory of the Leisure Class.
- gaius 15y agoThe point of Latin was that it is the root of many European languages, so by studying it early on in education, you would later more easily be able to pick up one of its descendents.
- yequalsx 15y agoWhat is truly amazing is how easy it is to find those answers today. With Google, Wolframalpha, etc. retrieving information is cheap both time wise and money wise. Perhaps a test could be made today that would test a person's ability to search for obscure knowledge and comprehend it. A person would have to determine which sources are trustworthy and what conclusion could be made from the information received. Is this what is really meant when we say someone is intelligent?
- tybris 15y agoI think we're moving from single answer knowledge to multi-answer understanding of the matter. This involves being able to absorb large amounts of information, rather than being able to find obscure information. We probably need more knowledge than ever before, but it has more breadth and less specificity. A historian might be asked to discuss why Spain and Portugal were the first of the European countries to build a colonial empire. You wouldn't directly find that on wikipedia and there is not one single answer that will suffice. To be able to answer it, you need to be aware of the Reconquista, abundant military resources, conquered wealth, etc. and be able to support any claim you make about them. You can search for the details, but you need to have a broad enough knowledge to know what to search for. A mathematician might be asked about the importance of prime numbers in mathematics. Again, not something on wikipedia, Google, or wolfram alpha, or with a single answer.
- yequalsx 15y agoThis is the essence of what I was getting at. You've elaborated on what I was getting at. It's somewhat pointless to ask on a test when the U.S. Civil War ended. A much better indication of intelligence and knowledge is to ask why it didn't end sooner. Not too long ago people would spend hundreds of dollars (thousands in today's money) for a set of encyclopedias. Now, with Google, Wolframalpha etc. such a product has no use. The cost to find knowledge has dramatically decreased the past 15 years. Education has not caught up with this reality.
- danvet 15y agoOne of the best examples for an exam like this was the final exam in history at my high school. Half of it was a few class-wide topics of 20th century history. The other half was anything of the students choosing, I've chosen the policy of Perestroika of Gorbatschov and the downfall of the Sowjet Union. The exam was simply a text snippet (dunno anymore whether newspaper or something more official) from the time about the reunion of the two Germans, and the assignment was to put it into greater context and connect it with other things that happened at the time, hereby explaining this particular incident. The questions for the general part were of similar spirit. It's been one of the best exams I've ever had. Not just because I've got a straight A, but also because I've actually _learned_ something while writing it: It forced me to think about the knowledge I've already amassed from a different pov for two hours, greatly increasing my understanding of it. I think every exam should be like that: If you haven't learned anything new while writing/having it, it's likely just pointless rendition of stuff learned by heart. And frankly, computers just beat humans at that ;-). Of course, doing this requires good teachers and quite an investment of time from them.
- mjs 15y agoI found some Cambridge exam papers from 1899 a while back. I don't have scans, but there's a few of the more interesting/mysterious questions at: http://beebo.org/lately/2001-07-10_cambridge.html http://beebo.org/lately/2001-07-10_cambridge.html I quite like the 2.5 hour "English Essay" for bizarreness: Write an English Essay on one of the following subjects: 1. English country life in the 18th century. 2. The battle of Blenheim. 3. The character of Rachel Lady Castlewood. 4. Duelling.
- nanijoe 15y agoI'm not sure what you find bizarre, having to write an essay or the choice of topics? This type of question is pretty much standard on (high school) English exams in many commonwealth countries, even today.
- gaius 15y agoThey have duels in your country?!
- eru 15y agoNo, but they are still a topic in fiction / history.
- mjs 15y agoThe choice of topics, really. This was for (I think) an entrance exam, and so the only topic I think even vaguely suitable to write about without forewarning is "English country life in the 18th century." The Battle of Blenheim and the character of Rachel Lady Castlewood can only be attempted if you already know about those (very specific) things, and duelling is broad, and odd.
- Goladus 15y agoI don't know whether this is an entrance exam and that would definitely change things. But either way, according to Wikipedia, dueling was a part of British culture though the early 1800s, the last fatal duel was in 1856. Meaning a typical candidate from an elite family in 1899 will have a living relative who has probably at least read public discourse about dueling, and there's a good chance the subject has come up at least once during primary education.
- wicknicks 15y agoInteresting. The Math section with today's GRE exam makes the latter seem like a kindergarten exam.
- tokenadult 15y agoGraduate students from China (in such humanities subjects as philosophy) derided the GRE main test mathematics section (used as one element of admission decisions for graduate schools in the United States) as a test of "junior high math," which it literally is in terms of the standard curriculum of urban schools in China. The GRE subject test in mathematics, used largely but not exclusively for admission into graduate programs in mathematics, actually has some undergraduate mathematics content, but the mathematics section of the general GRE includes only mathematics that any well educated person who completed secondary schooling ought to know.
- aeroevan 15y agoFYI, most graduate students I know here in the US also consider the math section in the GRE to be a joke. But as a grad student in an engineering school I guess that's to be expected. When I took the GRE, the hardest thing about the math test was having to remember long division, since we couldn't use calculators.
- alexanderswang 15y agoHonestly, math section of this 1869 test is still kind of joke for Chinese high school students. Getting full mark is easy for those well educated middle school students, say, up to about 30 percent won't be a overstated figure.
- gorgoroth666 15y agoThe maths is so easy I want a vintage 1900 Harvard diploma.
- uberalex 15y agoWhy does it say "July, 1869" at the bottom? Were they using the same set of questions for 30 years, or was it put in the library 30 years after it was used?
- cydonian_monk 15y agoGood question. I would hazard a guess that they revised the test every year, but didn't want to put the more recent copies of it in the library as they'd be similar, and could poison the results. And therefore they held back old versions as "secret" for, say, 30 years. (Thus your later case, that the test was placed in the library 30 years after it was used.) Or perhaps this was lost under someone's desk for 30 years in the admissions department, and when they moved into new offices they said "we should put this in the library for posterity's sake."
- jules 15y agoThe font reminds me of TeX.
- koenigdavidmj 15y agoKnuth's fonts were meant to model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting .
- eagleal 15y agoThe Latin part (1st one) is very simple. The Latin high-school final exam here in Italy is way more difficult (you translate, analyze and discuss Latin authors from their original texts, eg. Cicero is tricky). As schrototo said the greek part should be as easy.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- pitdesi 15y agoOriginal article here is worth reading: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/remembering-when-college-was-a-buyers-bazaar/ http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/remembering-wh... Notes that... "of the 210 candidates who took its 1870 test the June before, 185 were admitted." Also, according to the NYT, this is the 1869 exam, not the 1899 exam (maybe it was added to the library in 1899, hence the stamp?)
- mberning 15y agoTuition was probably also around $100 back then. My how we've 'progressed'.
- Dn_Ab 15y agoAccording to [1] tuition was $150 in 1900. According to [2] average annual wage was $450. Assuming women in the work place was a lot less common I will bump it to $500. So about 30% of household income? Harvard costs $34,976 in 2010. According to [3] median household income in 2009? is $49,777. So 70% of median income. Prices as a percentage of average income has certainly gotten steeper but you cannot argue that things now are less open than they used to be. There are more women and minorities and scholarship opportunities for different groups. Certainly things could be a lot better but progress has surely been made. You can't throw a number like $100 without context. [1] http://kwharbaugh.blogspot.com/2005/02/educational-costs.html#harvard-tuition-history http://kwharbaugh.blogspot.com/2005/02/educational-costs.htm... [2] http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/his/e_prices1.htm http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/his/e_prices1.htm [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income
- rayiner 15y agoIt is under-appreciated how open Harvard, Yale, etc, have gotten in modern times. While tuition at Harvard might be 70% of the median annual income today, someone whose family makes $50k/year pays nothing in tuition. At Yale between $60k-$120k, tuition is held at about 10% of family income. Full tuition doesn't phase in until well over $200k. My brother is at Yale, and his classmates are by and large the children of upper middle class professionals. Certainly kids who've gotten a good shake in life, but mostly people who got in because of good SAT scores and extracurriculars, not donations or political connections.
- bialecki 15y agoThis is really interesting especially given that Harvard now offers "Counting People" and "Magic of Numbers" as classes that satisfy the math (quantitative reasoning) requirement. That's not to say the requirements are better or worse than 100 years ago, it's just interesting how much broader the course offerings are now. You could avoid math, and I know people who did, if you didn't want to take it. And of course, almost no one knows Latin or Greek.
- tkahn6 15y agoAnyone know what the time limit on the test is?
- arctangent 15y agoMaybe I'm out of line but none of that looks too difficult. I studied a (spoken) language at school and was tested on that. Learning Latin isn't too different. The mathematical elements of the test looked straightforward.