Monday, April 11, 2011

Could You Pass Harvard's Entrance Exam From 1869?

The New York Times recently covered an interesting piece of the history of old distinguished universities. It was a pretty interesting article that you can find here: Remembering When College Was a Buyer’s Bazaar

The real reason I was interested is that they dug up an old entrance exam from Harvard in 1869.

The curriculum is wildly different of course with requirements in knowing Latin and Greek, but could you pass the same stuff that we need to know today? 


Anyway, check out the PDF here.



32 comments:

  1. I'm kind of nervous for my future school-career. Hope it all goes smoothly, don't want to psned two years trying to get accepted or anything...

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  2. before: challenge accepted.
    after: poker face.

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  3. I click on the link and get an adobe document but it's blank but it may be the shitty work computer.

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  4. Ahaha, oh my. Well I can do all the math, and I little of the history, literature, geography, but not even close to what they're asking.

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  5. no. That's all I have to say. I can't do any of that. Well at least not without giving it a huge amount of effort, and probably google.

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  6. I failed at first question lol

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  7. ill be honest, i dont know how to do a single one of these

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  8. saving this for later, very interesting. it cant be as hard as it is now surely

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  9. I didn't know a single one

    feels bad, man

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  10. Haha! There's no way I can do it! Literally know nothing about latin right now!

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  11. wow, i wont pass it for sure right now. i like to believe if i studied hard i would )

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  12. Very cool, I wonder why they placed such importance on all things Latin and Greek back then.

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  13. latin stuff was tricky and i studied latin quite a lot!
    math stuff was ok.
    history fail.
    geography fail.

    i remember when i was doing further maths A-level (for americans - that's extra hard maths for 18 year-olds) we did practice papers that were old o-level papers from the 70s (ordinary maths for 16 year-olds).

    no doubt exams are dumbing down. however, there is good argument that knowledge is literally at our fingertips now, and so there should be a swing in emphasis towards less rote learning of knowledge and towards understanding and communication. i think that's a bit oversimplified, but you catch the drift i'm sure.

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  14. Took a course in Latin once. Apparently it didn't stick at all.

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  15. Damn thats hard, i would never get into harvard haha

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  16. oh man that's crazy difficult!

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  17. couldn't answer a damn one oh lawd.

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  18. back in the days, exams used to mean something.

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  19. No, just no, read the first page and gave up

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  20. Saw this on redderp, I know I couldn't pass that test for my life haha. Very cool read though.

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