9 ms·
Could you pass this 8th grade test from 1912?
- Finnucane 2y ago8th-grade me would probably score better than today-me.
- kevinmershon 2y agoExactly. It seems like so many people fall into the logical trap that school is about getting you to permanently memorize facts that, in a typical adult life, end up being largely trivia. School is about teaching your brain how to retain information in general, so you can retain what you need to use.
- Finnucane 2y agoMy brain is pudding. Also, 8th-grade me learned stuff that wasn't even known in 1912. What needs to be learned changes over time.
- setopt 2y agoExactly. How well would a 1912 student do on an 8th-grade test today for comparison? They would lack any info about world wars, decolonization, computers, space race, internet, climate change, just to pick some topics taught today.
- oceanplexian 2y agoThat only strengthens the argument that they were better educated. The people who built all those things and won two world wars were educated with this curriculum. They took us from horse and buggy to space travel, clearly they were doing something right with education.
- ttyprintk 2y agoNot correct. This test would have impaired Linus Pauling, who was in eighth grade in 1912. He lacked two credits in American history and was never allowed to make them up. He won two Nobel prizes in chemistry. More broadly, home schooling seems to be more effective in 19th century America. Edison likely never took any test and definitely never attended a college that depended on it. He was home-schooled because his hearing was so bad.
- Finnucane 2y agoWere they better educated? In some states, it would have still been against the law to teach evolution. When I was in grade school we had court-ordered desegregation of the schools; they had Jim Crow. Schools represented very different values in those days.
- consteval 2y agoYou're fixating on the highest achievers of the highest achievers. Most people couldn't even read or write. Education was much less of a priority then, because you didn't require an education to have a decent life for the time period. In fact, often getting an education was a huge disadvantage - because you weren't working earlier. Skills are acquired with hands then. The sooner you put them to use, the better for your career as a factory man.
- paulpauper 2y agoI think it's more of a filtering mechanism for people who are smart but also obedient. these people are economically valuable
- tourmalinetaco 2y agoPerhaps previously, but as long as there is some minimum effort schools will rarely ever fail you. High scores are rewarded but genuine intelligence (which is a variant of the norm) is stamped out as the school system fears variance.
- consteval 2y agoI don't think this is true. Modern schools give many different opportunities to express intelligence in novel ways. I took music theory in high school, we wrote chorales. We had robotics too, for those that wanted it. It's true though that if you're learning math the focus is on learning math, not theorizing new branches of mathematics. The reason being that most topics are cumulative. You can't study abstract algebra if you didn't pay attention in high school algebra. In that way, they force conformance. But largely I think this is a good thing. This sort of thing also applies to English/Language Arts. In order to comprehend more complex media, you have to be able to comprehend simple media. Often, I hear people lament about how school didn't teach them about real life. Typically, the reason why is because they didn't pay attention in English class. There's a lot there. Also, intelligence is virtually worthless without knowledge. Intelligence just describes potential. If you don't use that potential, it's no different than if you had no intelligence at all.
- gregjor 2y agoNot really. Or if I take that as face value, schools fail at it. School mainly serves as day care and social programming: obey authority, believe what we tell you, remember what will appear on the test. Some people get more out of it than others.
- michaelt 2y agoBelieve me, politicians also want citizens to get higher paying jobs, so they can pay more taxes. If you've got a system that can reliably take a citizen earning $40,000/year and turn them into a citizen earning $140,000/year, governments from all over the world will beat down a path to your door. Over a 40 year career that's an extra $4 million in taxable income.
- gregjor 2y agoNothing about government policies in my lifetime tells me either party or any administration makes increasing individual incomes a priority. Instead they created a system that puts young people in debt to pay for devalued degrees, then don't allow discharging that debt in bankruptcy. Telling everyone to go to college to get a degree just led to an example of Goodhart's Law -- people optimized for getting a piece of paper rather than optimizing for learning anything or at least graduating with some career skills. I can think of many other examples of the government fleecing citizens into poverty (medical care, just to give one), enriching a few corporations and wealthy individuals at the expense of the general welfare. A government that cared about its citizens making more money wouldn't have hundreds of thousands of them living on the streets. If the government actually prioritized increasing tax revenues I can point them to some very rich companies and individuals not paying their share.
- JojoFatsani 2y agoI don’t have stats but in that period of time, but I imagine a lot of “less serious” students were dropping out by 8th grade to work in unskilled labor.
- paulpauper 2y agoyes this is the obvious confounder. They make it almost impossible to fail or drop out of school
- bryanlarsen 2y agoAccording to the top comment, only about 10% of students attended high school at the time.
- defrost 2y ago10% of primary school students went on to high school? 10% of high school aged people attended a high school? 90% of students enrolled in high school never bothered to attend or "worked from home"?
- zephyrfalcon 2y agoIt's 1912. Most likely they worked in a factory.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- paulpauper 2y agoThis all being said - I would expect an 8th grader of 2024 to pass the 1912 test. Look at the questions, they are nothing untoward, not rocket science. Yeah, but the vast majority wouldn't, so isn't this contradictory? Is he trying to say 8th graders could pass if they studied or had the identical question in advance? That, too, I am skeptical of. Maybe some could, but most would not. The reason is because the corpus of knowledge is so large. It's not like those are the only questions, but rather drawn from much larger reading. This is why even well-educated adults do poorly on general knowledge tests--what is considered 'general knowledge' is quite vast. The difference now vs. 1912: Emphasis on specialization for gifted kids, but also considerable intra-classroom variability of skill, so you have some kids learning multi-variable calc at 9th grade (not at school, but rather at local college, private tutoring , or self-study such as online with apps), and on the other extreme, others still struggling with fractions. In 1912, the strugglers would have been weeded out by either dropping out of school or learning a trade. Mandatory k-12 school was not yet a thing. So there are selection biases here. Same for demographic change.
- t-3 2y agoThe only reason a modern 8th grader wouldn't pass is that most of these questions are about regurgitating memorized snippets of data, which has been out of style for quite a while. The math portion is a few grades less advanced than what I was learning in 8th grade a few decades ago.
- jey 2y agoWhat was a passing grade back then? Even today this varies a lot in different systems. In the US public school system, 70% is considered passing, but in other contexts tests are constructed so that e.g. 35% correct is a passing grade.
- StefanBatory 2y agoFor Polish school system (I know it's not relevant but most people still like trivia like this-) Passing grade, 2, in most schools would be from around 30% to 50%. It's teacher choice.
- mmmBacon 2y agoGenX here. 70% was minimum acceptable grade when I was in US public school and when I was in College. You could technically pass a class in public school with 60% (D-). However you needed a C GPA to graduate high school in my day. In college anything below a C put you on academic probation. In graduate school anything lower than a B put you on academic probation.
- llm_trw 2y agoAt university there were classes where anything less than 80% was considered a fail and there were other classes where anything more than 35% was considered astonishingly good. It really depends on the lecturer and their style.
- parpfish 2y agoFor my college math and physics exams, the profs would pick exercises at random and wouldnt know how hard the test was until after the grades came in. And having a super high ceiling where a 25% is passing allowed them to see if there were any super geniuses in the class
- llm_trw 2y agoIt was indeed in physics/math/cs where I had classes with a passing grade of >30%. A memorable classes being Electromagnetism 4 where the passing grade in my year was 8% and Quantum Mechanics 3 with 15%.
- userbinator 2y ago"eneeavor" "kalsomining" "dodr" "Decline I." Is this AI-generated? It certainly has all the signs of being so. I've read real books from the late 19th and early 20th century, and while occasional typos do appear, their density here is suspicious. Thus my conclusion is that I don't think this is a real 8th grade test.
- wiml 2y agoWhat is "Decline I" a typo of? I interpret is as a request to decline (that is, give the inflected forms of) the pronoun "I".
- wazoox 2y agoCould also be "Decline one", in any case, not a typo. "I" can be declined as subjective I, objective me, reflexive myself, possessive my, independent possessive mine.
- amgreg 2y ago“Decline I” is an instruction for the student to provide the first person pronoun in all cases: I (nominative), me (accusative/dative/ablative), my (genitive), mine (genitive substantive). (I have borrowed the case names from Latin, with which I am more familiar. I think the English cases are nominative, objective, possessive.) I believe the misspellings in the spelling section are intentional so that the student will identify them—I am guessing that’s the point.
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago"eneeavor" is I think the only misspelling in the spelling section, so I don't think it is intentional. Perhaps the test was read aloud.
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago"Kalsomining" is the -ing form of "kalsomine", ie. whitewash. "Decline I" is a request to decline the pronoun "I".
- siva7 2y agoI would have failed the test. It frightens me that an 8th grader would be better educated than me today.
- satisfice 2y agoThat’s not education. Most of it is simple memorization.
- drewcoo 2y agoUnderstanding biology or that nouns decline is not "simple memorization."
- satisfice 2y agoThis test doesn’t test whether you “understand biology.” Come on… seriously? The mathematics is simple. The rest of it is stuff that is simple to Google. There’s a little bit of interpretation, but none of this is about problem solving or any kind of serious analysis.
- StefanBatory 2y agoYes, but in their defense - back in those times you'd be unable to Google ;) So memorisation was necessity.
- satisfice 2y agoIt was a necessity. It was NOT education, except in the most trivial and, frankly, demeaning sense of that word.
- StefanBatory 2y agoBut it is still a base for education. You cannot use knowledge you do not have.
- 2y ago
- cocok 2y agoThe teachers misspelled Serbia and Romania, but expect little American kids to know where these are.
- userbinator 2y agoThose appear to be the historically correct spellings: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Roumania https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Roumania https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Servia https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Servia
- drewcoo 2y agoThey were in sorta different places then . . . Remember that big hot war in the 90s? And there was that thing in the 40s, too . . .
- cocok 2y ago> Remember that big hot war in the 90s? Ah, when the Servians shot down the invisible airplane, because they didn't see it. I remember :-)
- jcranmer 2y agoThe Balkans of 112 years ago did not look like the Balkans of today (for starters, Serbia no longer borders Turkey), and countries' spelling changes over time. For example, Turkey now desires that English-speaking people use Türkiye instead. But maybe it's too much to ask of modern Americans to understand that spellings of proper nouns can and do change over time.
- fallingknife 2y agoSo did you. The correct spelling of "Serbia" is Србија, or Srbija. Anything else is arbitrary.
- lettergram 2y ago> While it might be easy to romanticize the rigor of early 20th-century education based on this exam, it's important to recognize that the educational system of 1912 served a very different purpose compared to today’s system. The 1912 exam prioritized foundational, concrete knowledge, preparing students for the immediate demands of adult life in a largely localized, labor-intensive world. In contrast, the 2024 education system aims to equip students with the skills needed for a global, ever-changing job market, emphasizing critical thinking, creativity, and technological literacy. I'd much prefer my children to have concrete knowledge and prepared for the world. Frankly, they'll be plenty prepared for the job market. Many of the folks I work are barely able to function outside of their role at work -- order all their food, can't change a tire, outsource all knowledge, etc. They're probably like the aristocrats in the 17th - 19th centuries, where they know only what they need, servants take care of the rest.
- alephnerd 2y agoThis is an 8th grade exam from 1912 from Bullitt County in Kentucky for White students. It's not representative of the average American during that era - who would not have made it to 8th grade. Heck, in 1910, Kentucky had a 17% illiteracy rate [0] The fact that illiteracy using the IMF definition is non-existent in the US automatically means your average 8th grader today is better off than one a century ago. And if I'm honest, the exam itself doesn't seem that different from content I dealt with in 4th-6th grade and I was attending an urban lower middle class school back then. [0] - https://usa.ipums.org/usa/resources/voliii/pubdocs/1910/Vol1/36894832v1ch14.pdf https://usa.ipums.org/usa/resources/voliii/pubdocs/1910/Vol1...
- jdietrich 2y agoPractically all American adults are "literate" in the sense that they can recognise and write some words, but about 14% can't really read in any useful sense - they can usually understand a warning sign or recognise a brand name, but they couldn't reliably understand a one-paragraph newspaper article or find a program in a TV listing. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009481.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009481.pdf
- LegionMammal978 2y agoI wonder to what extent the questions on this test indicate deep knowledge of the many subjects covered, vs. just following precisely those facts taught in the year's curriculum. Clearly students were expected to memorize a lot of different things by rote, but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't much beyond what's covered by these questions.
- gregjor 2y agoSo, same as today? We call it teaching to the test.
- pm3003 2y agoThis test is pretty much what I had to learn in 6th and 7th grade for grammar and history, though the exams were never that extensive but smaller and every month or so. Some of the questions are look line bonus questions. I wouldn't have been able to place Serbia on a map in 8th grade (Montenegro didn't exist anymore/yet), but I remember a friend failing a 9th grade test where he was expected to name 30 African countries and either place them on a map or name their capital cities. The test was stupid but not that much outside expectations. It was mostly B-grade learning: learn the rules, apply the rules or research, reformulate, present etc. Critical thinking would begin in or just before highschool. Deep knowledge wasn't required.
- ttyprintk 2y agoPublic education is supposed to prepare voters. I see the reliance on historical memorization as preparation to detect bullshit from political candidates.
- readthenotes1 2y agoNot a chance I can't even read it on my small phone screen and I'll be d*mned if I have to zoom in
- GoblinSlayer 2y agoUse a magnifying glass.
- hmng 2y ago“Give at least five rules to be observed in maintaining good health.” It would be interesting to know what was the “right” answer to this in 1912.
- TacticalCoder 2y agoI'm pretty sure proper grammar and spelling would already gain you quite some points. An indian-australian's semi-recent take on modern "educayshun": https://youtu.be/iKcWu0tsiZM https://youtu.be/iKcWu0tsiZM
- highcountess 2y agoIt’s a bit on the nose and does not address the causes of the lampooned state of affairs, but what makes that video even more terrifying is that it was made 8 years ago, not today.
- ryandrake 2y agoThe acting and production value was pretty good, for an indie short movie, but I'm not sure I understand what they are lampooning. Are there actually math classes even remotely like what was depicted? This seems like social criticism against something that is not actually happening.
- GoblinSlayer 2y agoMaybe it's about hygiene?
- ttyprintk 2y agoIt struck me that germ theory demands at least one question is overhauled. Yet, how would you have tested someone on the preparation for scientifically investigating germ theory?
- Timwi 2y agoSomebody already mentioned this inside of a thread, but I want to point it out separately: neither the blog post nor the original image mention what counts as a “passing grade”. It's not wild to think that this was very different in 1912.
- navigate8310 2y agoWild guess, 33.33%
- ttyprintk 2y agoI wager it’s subjectively graded and that portable test scores hadn’t caught on. That is, the reputation of the teacher was the measure of a minimum viable student. The census was barely automatically calculated at that time.
- bloomingeek 2y agoThank goodness for the internet, best I could tell, I scored a 73! :)
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago> In contrast, the 2024 curriculum for eighth graders focuses on critical thinking, problem-solving, and the application of concepts rather than pure memorization. Modern eighth-grade assessments tend to incorporate multiple-choice questions, data interpretation, and critical analysis tasks, emphasizing skills over the retention of facts. For instance, geography in 2024 often includes understanding climate change impacts, human migration, and data analysis using technology. Students are less often asked to memorize the names of specific rivers or capitals and more often expected to understand broader concepts, such as the implications of geographic features on human civilization. Strongly disagree. A 12 year old has zero chance of applying critical thinking or data analysis to complex subjects like climate change or human migration. It's still memorization, he's still expected to regurgitate a few lines he learned in school.
- pm3003 2y agoIt reminds me of a time in my first college year when we had to learn underlying principles of ethics-based leadership (I kid you not). It was some kind of bullshit but everyone did his best to take it seriously. The teacher repeated every time that he wanted us to understand broader concepts and do everything but rote learning. Almost everyone then failed the exam (based on analysing various situations). The expected answers were word-for-word copies of the teaching material, that sometimes felt unrelated to the question. It was so absurd that we all took it as some involuntary but elaborate joke/life lesson.
- piker 2y ago...and what proportion of the public school teaching population is equipped to evaluate critical thinking on such subjects? They're testing for some binary issue spotting at best.
- pessimizer 2y agoConstructivists have been claiming victory since they started, despite the consistently terrible results. So they bury rote learning under a mountain of constructivist jargon, so at least they can show something.
- undebuggable 2y agoI knew all these answers once. Knowing them then got me to where I am now.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- axus 2y agoI've never known exactly the size of a cord of wood.
- undebuggable 2y agoI mean rather culturally, historically, and geographically adjusted as these are very US centric.
- highcountess 2y ago[flagged]
- plorg 2y agoI'm pretty sure I was tested on at least 80% of this as an eighth grader or thereabouts. To the extent that modern children may not be it likely reflects different priorities in education. To the extent that I could not answer some of it without Google 20 years later much of the relevant knowledge of not contained in rote memorization.
- ralfd 2y agoIs the rope question’s answer 70 feet?
- pekim 2y agoIt's 50 feet. Using Pythagoras, it's the square root of 30*2 + 40*2. It effectively a 3, 4, 5 right angle triangle.
- sandworm101 2y agoNo. A2 + b2 = c2 And this is pre-calculator so the number is one of the squares that the kids would have memorized. 4^2 + 3^2 = 25 = 50 feet.
- fastball 2y agoIt's not worded super clearly, but they mean that the rope is being tied diagonally from the top of the building to a point 30 feet away from the building's base (horizontally). Like you, I initially interpreted the question to mean that the building was 30 feet above ground level, which left me a bit confused.
- EncomLab 2y agoI saw a quote the other day - "We used to teach Latin and Greek in High School, now we teach remedial English in College." - seems pretty much on point. Massachusetts, a state renowned for it's commitment to education, is voting next month to eliminate it's High School exit exam - which if passed would leave only 7 states with any form of statewide graduation requirement. Feels pretty regressive - the soft-bigotry of low expectations coming to the forefront.
- ForHackernews 2y agoThere used to be jobs that would hire without a high school diploma. Now it's harder and harder to find one that will take people without a college degree. What's 21st century capitalism's plan for people who aren't any good at Latin and Greek?
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago>What's 21st century capitalism's plan for people who aren't any good at Latin and Greek? Let them become homeless and addicted to fentanyl and slowly wither away and die or have to resort to crime to survive then lock them up and tax the people who are good at Latin and Greek to pay for their upkeep or UBI so they don't get robbed or murdered on the street by the people who aren't good at Latin or Greek and have nothing left to loose.
- EncomLab 2y agoIt's not a direct analogy - it's a commentary on the expectations of students. Learning Latin was a fundamental part of a science or medical education, Greek was a fundamental part of what we would call a humanities education - they were the keys to communicating across boundaries in an era when English had not yet become the "global language". If anything this makes the fact that there are entire school districts in the US wherein not a single student can read to grade level even more troubling - how can someone possibly succeed at anything other than being a TikTok star without the ability clearly communicate?
- watwut 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- trymas 2y agoHistory’s 2nd task is to draw (??) a sketch of some historical figures. Wonder how this was graded. Wikipedia for images: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stuyvesant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stuyvesant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Raleigh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Raleigh Sketch one balding clean shaven face and sketch another one with pointy triangular beard?
- ks2048 2y agoMerriam-Webster dictionary definition of “sketch” (2): a brief description (as of a person) or outline
- arijun 2y agoThat’s how I read it as well
- ttyprintk 2y agoIt’s interesting that those figures would not have occurred in political cartoons, and that you are told to sketch briefly, as if prone to waste time on too much detail.
- ks2048 2y ago“Parse all the words in the following sentences”. What does that mean? Give the part-of-speech for each word?
- glimshe 2y agoHigh School students learned compiler fundamentals back then!
- jzb 2y ago“What President was impeached, and on what charge?” Well that question didn’t age well…
- bradgranath 2y agoWell, it asks about Personal Pronouns, so that's half the country's brains exploded right there.