Ask HN: Harvard Entrance exam 1899. Can you pass it? [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Harvard Entrance exam 1899. Can you pass it? [pdf]

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33 pointsvinnyglennon23 comments

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.

Sure, how about the rest of the exam? Can't pass a few sections and fail the rest and expect to "pass". Also, what's your definition of passing the exam? Because passing probably isn't good enough. Probably a competitive exam with time pressure.

OP did not say they would pass the exam. They said they would pass the math portion.

Most of us wouldn’t pass this exam because even if we took Latin we probably didn’t take Greek. However if we were applying to Harvard in 1899, we probably would have studied that in addition to the mathematics portion. Talking about time pressure as a way to dismiss OP is disingenuous given they likely would have spent a significant portion of their time studying for the exam back then.

>Most of us wouldn’t pass this exam because even if we took Latin we probably didn’t take Greek.

Even if we do know Latin, it's because we were raised Catholic and probably wouldn't be allowed to take the exam any more than a Jewish person. It's 1899 we're talking about. These pathetic superstitions were no doubt prevalent.

Except for the part where they talk about doing mathematics with areas measured in square rods and feet. Not even Americans who know about feet know what a rod is (without Googling it).

Yeah, that was one of the parts I have no chance of solving. I assume back in the day and/or for Americans this would have been just as commonly used as ha or a, which I still vaguely remembered the definitions of.

Can someone comment on the relative difficulty of the algebra and geometry/trig problems? I am far more confident in my algebra and found those problems fairly approachable, as in, I know how to tackle them, even if I am too lazy to actually do them. The geometry and trig problems are beyond my current knowledge, but I haven't used those skills in years at this point.

I am also fascinated by the contrast between some skills being essentially irrelevant (Latin and Greek) and others being nearly the same (algebra and arithmetic) after a good century. I guess the mathematicians win this round of "relevance over time" :)

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.

Yes that would have been common for students to knowledge for students from upper class families who would be applying to Harvard. I don’t know how much of that was taught in public schools at the time, but an education in the classics was considered foundational knowledge due to their (continuing) influence on Western culture. You would likely be reading a lot of Latin in your curriculum — even if you were not a classics scholar due to it being an international lingua Franca for so long. In England, “grammar schools” were originally schools that emphasized Latin grammar as part of the curriculum.

These old schools in America were originally founded to train ministers for whom knowing Latin and Greek (and Hebrew) to interpret early versions of the Christian scriptures was important so they could have a clearer understanding of the original meanings of the texts. Later, Greek/latin became about secular classical writings. The secularists took over and split the schools so the ministerial teaching occurred in separate “divinity schools”/seminaries.

For some specific background on Harvard origins: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Harvard_Universit...

Math is a part of a liberal education

This reminds me of the general GRE exam required by most of US STEM graduate schools which has an English part that does not mean to measure if you can talk in English or anything (TOEFL and ILETS are there for that) but it is really pointless. It will ask you are synonyms for words that no one is using and focuses on some stuff that even a native speaker wouldn't see in his lifetime.

Most of the world runs on that classical education. It underpins all human interaction and politics.

Kind of ironic, nous

I can agree that the world we currently live in was shaped by that classical education, but from my perspective the world is now ran by business majors, not people who've read Plato or Aquinas untranslated. Scholars aren't just scholars anymore, they must specialize in something before the world recognizes them. This is what I mean when I say we don't "use" the classical education anymore - it has become the exception, not the rule it once was.

On the surface, sure. It hasn't gone anywhere. The ideas derived from classical educations (read: not as career scholars, but initiated into that frame of understanding) are what define the shape of power.

Hell, Putin has a chaos magician (Dugin—shades of Rasputin) leading the shape of his global politics...

This reminds me of a poster that was hanging on a wall at my high school called The Final Exam

https://www.mit.edu/people/dmredish/wwwMLRF/links/Humor/The_...

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.

In the late 19th century hot metal typesetting was common.

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

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