Same shit happens in Turkey every year. Even the form of the questions are identical. In a sense, people who pass Student Selection and Placement Examination(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_Selection_and_Placement...) in Turkey may be the best matches for their work positions, but only in 1860s.
Harvard 1869 entrance exam
11–20 of 141 posts
Re: Harvard 1869 entrance exam
#12Curious to hear about the 'General Supposition' (in the Greek question for sophomores). Seems like it's really only found in New Testament Greek. Makes the test rather biased towards a particular religion. But perhaps that started to change right around that time with Eliot. Charles W. Eliot, president 1869–1909, eliminated the favored position of Christianity from the curriculum while opening it to student self-dire…
I am Greek and had to do six years of Ancient Greek. I don't understand how you got to that conclusion. The test is asking questions on ancient Greek grammar and only. It has nothing to do with religion or what so ever, New Testament Greek is very close but also very different from Ancient Greek -it has some idiosyncrasies of it's own. I really want to know how you concluded that this has something to do with religio…
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Re: Harvard 1869 entrance exam
#13The math here is surprisingly weak. I'm not sure about where you guys went to school, but this is fifth grade stuff. Sure, there's a lot of memorization, more classics. But wowzers. No math.
Re: Harvard 1869 entrance exam
#14This looks way harder than the SATs, or rather any standardized test for college admissions that's in use today.
Only because it demands regurgitation of specific facts you don't happen to have memorized.
That isn't true. Only the history/geography was recall. Latin translation and geometric proofs aren't regurgitation.
Re: Harvard 1869 entrance exam
#15I'm surprised there's no calculus. Not even a basic derivative. The rest of the exam is certainly difficult to warrant a calculus question.
Re: Harvard 1869 entrance exam
#16I'm surprised there's no calculus. Not even a basic derivative. The rest of the exam is certainly difficult to warrant a calculus question.
I think that at that point calculus was a grad-school-level thing. At the very least, it wasn't being taught in high schools. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's only taught in high schools today under the aegis of Advanced Placement classes, which give you college credit.
Re: Harvard 1869 entrance exam
#17The math here is surprisingly weak. I'm not sure about where you guys went to school, but this is fifth grade stuff. Sure, there's a lot of memorization, more classics. But wowzers. No math.
I very much doubt that most college students today, even in technical majors, could work out the geometry proofs. I was a calculus TA for two years in college (at an engineering school), and students don't know geometry anymore. Nor can they prove anything at all.
Re: Harvard 1869 entrance exam
#18This looks way harder than the SATs, or rather any standardized test for college admissions that's in use today.
Only because it demands regurgitation of specific facts you don't happen to have memorized.
There were only one or two questions in the mathematical part of the test that I would consider regurgitation -- the rest is stuff modern students should be able to do.
Re: Harvard 1869 entrance exam
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only because it demands regurgitation of specific facts you don't happen to have memorized.
That isn't true. Only the history/geography was recall. Latin translation and geometric proofs aren't regurgitation.
Plane geometry is woefully lacking in education nowadays. The situation is so sad that some of these questions are very similar to the geometry questions in the USAMO/IMO
Re: Harvard 1869 entrance exam
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only because it demands regurgitation of specific facts you don't happen to have memorized.
That isn't true. Only the history/geography was recall. Latin translation and geometric proofs aren't regurgitation.
Actually from a cursory look at the Latin part, it seemed that all of the sentences and things they chose for you to translate were very specific cases of applying rules.
Maybe a bit harder than some of the other stuff, but still regurgitation.