What Was on the First SAT? | Hacker News Reader

What Was on the First SAT?

smithsonianmag.com

33 pointsdanso16 comments

For comparison, the link below [1] is for the Harvard Entrance Exam in 1899. "Write only as much as you can revise carefully."

[1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvarde...

I'm sure in due time we'll find that many of the questions asked today are as inane and conditional as the ability to distinguish between cuts of beef and cow organs.

> the ability to distinguish between cuts of beef and cow organs.

This sounds like basic biology to me.

Cuts of beef? There is more than one way of doing it, it's completely cultural.

That is only vaguely true.

There are some cuts that vary culture to culture (like Americans leave a lot of meat on ribs compared to Europeans), but in general cuts derive from the musculature of the animal and the various boundaries between the muscles. It's pretty obvious to all cultures what the "breast" of a bird is, because the meat all has the same texture.

Cuts mostly derive from nature in the same way mathematical formulas do.

It's only obvious to cultures that eat meat. I grew up vegetarian in a Hindu family (in the US). Until late college, I would not have been able to tell you how filet mignon, sirloin, chuck, rib differed -- or even what animal they referred to.

> Cuts of beef?

No, cow organs. All cattle, regardless of where they're from, have the same organs. Any word you don't recognize isn't an organ, so it can't be the right answer. Assuming you know what the organs are, of course, which is basic biology.

That viewer is almost as terrible as Scribd. Does anyone have a link to the document itself?

http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/681564/1926-sat.pdf

What do you find terrible about it?

Always wondered what it was like.

At first, looking at the more rote-recall-based verbal section, I thought it didn't live up to the conception that it was an IQ test. But the math section didn't look easy, especially without a calculator, and I imagine that test-takers of the day didn't prepare like they do today, so the unfamiliar format of the test was probably part of the selection process.

The math problems appear designed to be workable in your head, fitting the 3-answers-per-minute target: divisions come out as whole numbers, and in the last one with the scary occurrence of pi you don't need to use it (it cancels out -- and I like that, with the time constraint you need to be thinking on your feet). I also like that it's not multiple-choice.

(But we're only seeing the first page of each section; I'll bet it gets harder.)

In case you don't see DocumentCloud's fullscreen button, here it is so you don't have to sidescroll on the test:

http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/681564-1926-sat.html#...

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edit: The info on the test composition is pretty interesting, and telling about how we protect our students from feeling like failures.

http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/681564-1926-sat.html#...

> Students had 97 minutes to answer a total of 315 questions on nine sub-tests..."You had to answer about three questions per minute," says O'Reilly. "The expectation was that nobody would finish the whole test."... Today, students have three hours and 45 minutes to tackle 170 questions and an essay on 10 sections..."Now, you have a little over a minute per question," says O'Reilly. "We are aiming for 80 percent of students getting to the end of the test."

It also somewhat changes the nature of the test. Under the original rules, you just had to be good at some subset of the skills/knowledge that were tested. Now you have to be good at pretty much everything on it to get a good score.

I can imagine if it was this way now it would be a lot like a MMORPG. There would be online forums griping that math students are OP and they nerfed chemistry this year.

Very nice, thanks for sharing

Interesting that it has a Linguistics section, as in the International Linguistics Olympiad, but not seen on a modern SAT or high school classroom. http://www.ioling.org/problems/samples/

I suppose that morphed in to the "logic puzzles" found on the modern LSAT.

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