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Comment by glhaynes | Hacker News Reader

http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp

Hmm, snopes doesn't seem to be saying that this is not, in fact, an exam from 1895, just that current educational standards haven't declined since then. So? Neither the HN headline nor the article make the claim that snopes refutes. Strawman.

This is interesting, just because it illustrates how the world has changed since 1895.

Could you have passed the 8th grade in 1895?

It's a dumb question that implies a conclusion that the text doesn't support. Snopes addresses the falseness of the implication adequately, and we're reproducing much of their reasoning here.

It's not a dumb question at all. The world has changed in 115 years, and it's not at all a obvious that the average HN reader has the knowledge and skills that were deemed important in Kansas in 1895.

The question its self doesn't imply a conclusion. If you come to one, it's because you have knowledge of the questioner's intentions that I do not.

This kind of "I never said that" semantic quibble raises one essential question: Have you stopped beating your elderly mother yet?

Things have implications beyond their explicit claims.

The two quibbles above seem nearly identical to me. It's interesting what role the assumptions of the audience play in their reaction to a statement.

I assumed that a snopes link would credit or discredit the claim (that this was a test from 1895.)

Pointing out a classic fallacy is hardly a quibble, and certainly not a question of semantics.

On the other hand, yes, it's quite true that all arguments appear in a specific context. I think we must live in quite different political contexts, though, because I don't see anything in the article that implies a decline in educational standards.

I've always preferred "Do you still beat your wife?"

Rolls off the tongue better.

The title is, "Could You Have Passed the 8th Grade in 1895? Take a Look". Snopes does a perfectly good job of making the point that merely "taking a look" will not help you to answer that question.

As soon as I saw this title I was going to post the Snopes rebuttal, but you beat me to it.

A non-tech family member will send this in an email chain at least once every six months along with some variant on this message: "OMG THE SKY IS FALLING, OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IS POOP!?!!" (All caps used for quote truth/ accuracy).

A statement being contradicted on Snopes isn't automatically rendered false. The education system, in at least some locations and some subjects, is indeed declining, based on the statements and experiences of several public school teachers I know personally.

An example of education system decline, since apparently at least one person doesn't believe me:

In the state where one of my teacher friends works, the statewide high school math curriculum currently consists of Algebra, Geometry, Algebra 2, Pre-calculus, and Calculus AB or BC. Advanced students can take Algebra as early as 7th grade, while struggling students take it as late as 10th grade. Soon, Algebra through Pre-calculus will be replaced with Math 1, Math 2, and Math 3, with Math 1 being mandatory for all 9th graders, Math 2 for 10th graders, and Math 3 for 11th graders. There are "honors" versions of each class available that differ little from the corresponding non-honors class.

This change, as it was explained to me, hurts both gifted students and struggling students. The gifted students are held back by as much as 3 years from where they could be in math, while struggling students are advanced regardless of competence.

"I have heard from someone that there is a specific instance where students do not partake in an education that is optimal for every single of them" != "The education system, in at least some locations and some subjects, is indeed declining"

Just describing the current state of affairs is by definition insufficient to be able to say something about the evolution over time of the quality of said affairs.

Not over the past 100+ years, no, but between two years ago and two years from now, yes. Further, this isn't a change that is not "optimal for every single [one] of them," this is a change that is significantly suboptimal for the majority of students.

May be, we don't know; if you have data or (somewhat) robust theories on why and how, please tell. My point was that your 'proof' wasn't proof at all for your stated premise. I suspect this will be hard for you, because I don't have rational reasons to believe that such a sudden drop-off is happening. I don't really know though, I'm just trusting on an abstract 'common sense' approach; the best I have in situation like this where objective measure are not available (to me).

Anyway please feel free to share your theories and data on why you think that over such a very short amount of time the level of education will take a sharp drop-off.

... and, in my experience, followed up with a comment about how "obviously shoveling money at the department of education doesn't fix anything."

Nice find. What I would be more interested to find out is how it compares to tests that are presently being given to 8th graders. It might be difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison though. I don't seem to recall having an actual final exam in 8th grade.

Nice find.

Snopes is TFM for this kind of unlikely forwarded-email fodder. Whoever submitted it was woefully negligent in not checking.

I did. Don't have copies of them, though.

I don't think I did, but Texas has something equivalent: the TAKS test. I doubt actual copies are available, but the social studies practice test is at:

  http://www.glencoe.com/sec/socialstudies/taks/gr08/

There is a math test at:

  http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/resources/online/2003/grade8/math.htm

They look pretty thorough to me. At least as good as KS 1895.

I glanced at the first test.

It had only one history question. The rest were reading comprehension questions that anyone with fairly basic English and logic skills should be able to answer.

I'm not a fan of memorization. But it seems plausible to argue that contemporary education hasn't added anything very challenging in it's place.

Holy cow. I took that test (it was called TAAS back then) and was basically just an easy day in school. It was nowhere near as tough as some of those questions look.

That page gives no evidence that it is fake, it's all just making excuses for how people shouldn't be expected to do well on it. I followed a couple of links bac and found Snopes's definition of "False" as "claims which cannot be established as true by a preponderance of (reliable) evidence." Which is easy enough, if you don't want it to be true under this standard, just don't look too hard for evidence.

I had never really looked into Snopes before, this just knocked its reputation back a good bit for me.

The claim at the top that they're saying is "false" is: "An 1895 graduation examination for public school students demonstrates a shocking decline in educational standards", a claim that's usually attached to this document when it's being forwarded around the internet. It's true that this post doesn't make that claim, but I posted the Snopes link just to try to head off the conversation from going in that direction. My comment would have been much better if I'd added more than just the link, though.

The Snopes page gives no evidence that it's fake because the snopes never makes the claim that it's fake.

Read the actual 'claim' statment. The claim is that the exam demonstrates a decline in education, not that the exam is real.

What do you propose we use to determine veracity if not evidence? Should we just believe everything we hear?

And isn't what you just did with Snopes a pretty good example of not wanting wanting something to be correct and not looking too hard for evidence to the contrary?

Snopes' notes suggest that the exam was first printed in the Salina Journal. Their website includes this page, which includes some more backstory, as well as answers: http://www.salina.com/1895test/

Maybe I missed it, but at no point did I see Snopes give an alternate age or source for the test. They only argue that the test isn't any harder than a modern test, which is IMO debatable.

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