Slashdot Mirror
Could You Pass Harvard's Entrance Exam From 1869?
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?"
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.
I wonder if they were allowed to use calculators?
Man, if the examiner had been smart he'd written page 3-4 in LaTeX and saved himself a lot of handwriting!!!!
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
To be fair, there weren't exactly a whole lot of science back then. Plus much of the scientific knowledge in 1869 were available exclusively in Latin, hence the emphasis on the "dead language".
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I find it hard to believe they had PDF files in 1869.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
PROTIP: Latin America does not speak Latin.
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.
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.
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
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. 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.
Better nutrition, especially during early childhood, is probably a bigger factor. Studies have shown that kids who go hungry in the first 5 or so years of life tend to score markedly below those that do not.
Monstar L
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.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
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
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
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
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