Harvard 1899 Entry Exam

damn #8 on the arithmetic section imagine doing that by hand no calculator.... it isn't hard just would take forever.

and kids these days thing getting into Harvard is hard...

Terrible that this is now in two separate posts.

On a side note, that test is absurd.

Yeah, by all means, let's get this going again.

posted in the wrong thread.

I think that may have been the test from 1869 (at least the math section). It says "July, 1869" on the bottom of the page.

I would have passed.

Latin, yes. Half the math, yes. Greek, no. Half the math, no.

Latin isn't that bad for anyone who's taken Latin in HS up to AP latin. I'm still impressed that people learned latin AND greek, but humans in general are very good at being multilingual if trained from an early age. Geography was fucking hard for me, but I would imagine this is just the kind of shit they were taught in school all the time. Math was a joke. All just tedious problems, nothing really difficult analytically.

The math questions are insane - it sounds easy b/c we have calculators but

one of the questions was "Divide 33368949.64 by .007253"

How is that even possible without a calculator? The amount of trial and error to solve that would take 20 minutes, and that's just 1 questions

The exam is from 1869. The 1899 is a library stamp. Why would it have a library stamp if it weren't some sort of historical document?

I don't remember math at all, especially how to do it by hand, I would've done bad on that section haha. I remember the little bit of statistics and algebra and calc I use for finance purposes. Other than that, no point in remembering stuff like trig, etc.

Taking French in HS was such a bad idea...

It's like apples and oranges who studies Greek anymore? Back then everybody studied Greek after a shimsham in the wolly-yard and after your britches had been cleaned, starched, and pressed, and you'd taken your monthly bath.

F this noise.

There doesn't appear to be a time limit on the sections, so all of the stuff, even the tedious math is do-able, just a PIA

Funny how the level of the algebra section looks much lower than the average of the exam. Maybe it's because a lot of progress has been made on the subject over the second half of the XIXth century though.

The maths, trigonometry, algebra etc is easy.

The rest of the exam is very hard.

It's interesting to see the differences in what people learned today vs. 150 years ago - and how they seem to have learned. Growing up, I remember lots of my tests were multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank-type ones which really emphasized memorization of lots of facts over actual fluency, writing skill and the ability to put different concepts together. I hated classes where profs would give essay tests and questions where I would actually have to write out a paragraph on something - it was just so much easier to check off a bunch of A's and B's on a scantron. But looking back, those are really the classes where I learned the most in - because I actually had to understand the material to be able to articulate it. Don't even get me started on calculators - I luckily had some great math teachers in middle school who still made us do things by hand/mental math - but so many people today (even fellow analysts here) struggle with arithmetics. And learning Greek and Latin makes sense when you consider that Greek and Roman history and philosophy are the basis for Western civilization, and learning these languages equips you with the skills to go to the primary sources.

I hesitate to say that people back then were "smarter" because you're also talking about a 19th century society where only the elite really got educated, so they could afford to get this classical education. Not sure how today's elite prep schools stack up since I went to public schools all of my life.