Harvard Entrance exam 1899. Can you pass it? [pdf]
Harvard Entrance exam 1899. Can you pass it? [pdf]
I am pretty sure I would have passed the mathematics section at the conclusion of high school. These question are not particularly harder than the questions you see in O/A level Mathematics, Advanced Mathematics, Further Mathematics exams.
The bottom of every page says "July, 1869"
Should the title of this post be updated?
The exam is from 1869. Only the library stamp is from 1899.
First page, translate Latin. What was the goal of this, were they studying Latin texts much? Would a maths student have known this?
I wonder how much of this ties into the concept of "classical education" we don't use anymore.
That seems really long for a single exam. How much time was given?
How would they have typeset this, especially the more complex equations? I'm guessing LaTeX didn't have great support on 1899 typewriters or printing presses.
I would have crashed the Greek paper because we were not taught accents, but the instructions make it very clear the answers require them!
This might be controversial, but I like the idea of school specific exams for elite schools. This allows the school to select the students they want and filter out the rest. They should have one for each of the majors (perhaps a more general one for related majors). They could just accept the highest scoring students. If there is a tie then they could either perform a waitlist or a random selection.
No, but I would have had preparation by high school if that was what was expected from me
And if I wasn’t enslaved or sharecropping, barred from all forms of credit, as well as landownership, homeownership, and happened to already be in the upper crust of society with the aforementioned assets, and welcomed by the others who also had those things
whoops I “politicized” it by describing reality