Good luck finding high school students today who could get a good score on this test.
There's vastly more emphasis on classical knowledge: Greek, Latin, ancient history, mathematical proofs...
Henry Adams on the Harvard of his day (he entered in 1854):
"disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile. The graduate had few strong prejudices. He knew little, but his mind remained supple, ready to receive knowledge."
"In the one branch he most needed--mathematics--barring the few first scholars, failure was so nearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value, and whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an accident or the personal favor of the professor. Here his education failed lamentably. At best he could never have been a mathematician; at worst he would never have cared to be one; but he needed to read mathematics, like any other universal language, and he never reached the alphabet."
But a) perhaps the mathematical curriculum had improved over the fifteen years between his entrance and that exam, and b) a large proportion of those who write about their schooling speak so poorly of it that one ends by suspecting exaggeration.
[Edit: in the spirit of "show your work": https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2044/pg2044-images.html]
Question 5 of the History and Geography section is just "Leonidas, Pausanias, Lysander."
Am I supposed to write about what they have in common? Who they each were? When and where they ruled? Other questions seem to include some form of instruction while being equally short ("Compare Athens with Sparta") but that one and a couple others are just a topic with seemingly no direction at all.
Grant, Sherman, Meade
Churchill, Roosevelt, De Gaulle
It's to filter the cultured elite from the unread plebes.
I think overall a Harvard-bound student today would do better on this test than a Harvard student from 1869 would do on the SAT, but I'm not sure if that even means anything.
I would have loved living among people whose elites valued Western culture so highly.