Interesting. The Math section with today's GRE exam makes the latter seem like a kindergarten exam.
Harvard's 1899 Entrance Exam [pdf]
21–30 of 99 posts
Re: Harvard's 1899 Entrance Exam [pdf]
#22Am I just being an engineer, or is the math way easier than the rest of this test?
My maths is relatively weak, and I found the maths component trivially easy. Perhaps mathematics had a smaller part to play in society at this stage, because asking a university level student what a prime number is or how to do long division seems trivial.
Doing cube root by hand is more tricky though.
Re: Harvard's 1899 Entrance Exam [pdf]
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
My maths is relatively weak, and I found the maths component trivially easy. Perhaps mathematics had a smaller part to play in society at this stage, because asking a university level student what a prime number is or how to do long division seems trivial.
Doing cube root by hand is more tricky though.
I'd characterize it as 'pointless tedium' and I'm glad our educational system is rid of it. It's easier to justify teaching Latin than that drudgery.
Re: Harvard's 1899 Entrance Exam [pdf]
#24Hurray for algebra! Still as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago. Are programming languages going to be equally durable?
That's the goal of Arc. :)
Re: Harvard's 1899 Entrance Exam [pdf]
#25Am I just being an engineer, or is the math way easier than the rest of this test?
I teach mathematics at a community college and I can tell you that for most people the mathematics on the test is hard. Our course with the largest number of students is on arithmetic and the students just don't comprehend fractions. They can't even comprehend how to convert a decimal to a percent. Especially when given a problem like: Conver 0.25% to a decimal. That really throws them off.
While I understand this question, I think it is a bit of a trick. I think it would make more sense to ask them to convert 1.25% to a decimal, or any percentage that did not have leading zeros.
Re: Harvard's 1899 Entrance Exam [pdf]
#26Am I just being an engineer, or is the math way easier than the rest of this test?
Have a look at the UK's STEP mathematics papers. They're the toughest school-level exams we have, used as entrance tests for a handful of degree courses. There are three papers each year, in increasing level of difficulty and assumed knowledge, and each candidate takes papers I and II or papers II and III.
http://www.admissionstests.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/adt/st...
Re: Harvard's 1899 Entrance Exam [pdf]
#27This test shows what was valued - at least at Harvard - in the late 1800's. Greek and Latin were more important, as well as knowledge of geography of the known world and algebra and geometry. Algebra and geometry, I feel, are still important today (see SAT). Greek and Latin are less important, although they are still in the background. The humanities have changed and we now learn about more modern authors / topics an…
Latin is and most likely already was in the XIXth century a tool to discriminate people, which is one of the role of education (even more so in the XIXth century maybe ?).
There are at least two ways to look at education from a purely economical POV: signal theory (I take someone from Harvard because he was able to go to Harvard) vs human capital theory (I take someone from Harvard because of the things he learned at Harvard).
Of course, there are still many more aspects to it: I take someone at Harvard because he met people at Harvard... and I am myself coming from Harvard, etc...
More simply, I am glad most of what I have learned was "useless" in some sense. What's useful or not changes in times, you cannot necessarily know what's useful to you when you're 15, and you could argue that one of the role of education is to teach you things you will never see otherwise (to expand your horizon).
Re: Harvard's 1899 Entrance Exam [pdf]
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doing cube root by hand is more tricky though.
I'd characterize it as 'pointless tedium' and I'm glad our educational system is rid of it. It's easier to justify teaching Latin than that drudgery.
Of course if you're doing it by trial and error on paper it is pointless tedium. But I'm sure that the point of doing these exercises were not bore you to death, but to really make you understand arithmetic so you can do most given problems faster. If all you knew was how to multiply and divide numbers by hand, that problem would take you hours to solve!
A great example is the section 'lucky numbers' in Feynman's book:
Re: Harvard's 1899 Entrance Exam [pdf]
#29Am I just being an engineer, or is the math way easier than the rest of this test?
Easy with a calculator yes, without one, not so much.
Re: Harvard's 1899 Entrance Exam [pdf]
#30Like all tests, it's not hard if you know the stuff that's asked. If you've studied ancient greek in school, that part of the test is probably as easy for you as the algebra part must seem to anyone who went to school in the past couple of decades (it looks about as hard as math homework from when I was 15 or so). edit: It's interesting. I do have a certain romantic attachment to this kind of classic humanist educati…
But to become a fully erudite member of modern society, you might want to also study zipWith :: (a-> b -> c) -> [a] -> [b] -> [c] :-)
Allowing one to simplify to:
fibs = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)
fibs = 1 : 1 : (zipWith (+) `ap` tail) fibs
fix $ (1:) . (1:) . (zipWith (+) `ap` tail)