Harvard’s 1869 Entrance Examination: Might You Reply Robust Questions About Latin, Greek, Historical Historical past, Airplane Geometry & Extra

In 2025, Har­vard as soon as once more started ask­ing appli­cants to sub­mit an SAT or ACT rating. This was a rever­sal of the no-test-nec­es­sary pol­i­cy that it and fairly just a few oth­er Amer­i­can col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties undertake­ed dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. To some observers of excessive­er edu­ca­tion, the dis­ap­pear­ance of the stan­dard­ized-test require­ment got here as a shock, although in a way, it was­n’t with­out prece­dent. Till the mid-nine­teen-tens, Har­vard had appli­cants take its personal entrance examination, since no stan­dard­ized take a look at exist­ed. One examination­ple from 1869, which you can see here, eval­u­at­ed stu­dents on their professional­fi­cien­cy in Latin, Greek, his­to­ry and geog­ra­phy, arith­metic, alge­bra, and airplane geom­e­strive.

The thought was­n’t a lot to eval­u­ate the test-tak­er’s rea­son­ing abil­i­ties as to ensure he’d already underneath­gone the anticipate­ed edu­ca­tion for his class. Even so, as the New York Times’ Ali­son Leigh Cow­an notes, “col­leges occa­sion­al­ly allowed prospects to cor­rect defi­cien­cies as a con­di­tion of admis­sion.”

This displays the very dif­fer­ent function excessive­er edu­ca­tion performed in Amer­i­can life a cen­tu­ry and a half in the past than it does immediately: again then, Har­vard admit­ted 185 out of 210 appli­cants; final 12 months, it admit­ted 1,968 out of 57,435. Because the coun­strive indus­tri­al­ized, col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties modified accord­ing­ly: exist­ing ones grew, many new ones appeared, and a larger and larger per­cent­age of stu­dents sub­mit­ted to a course of sur­spherical­ing ter­tiary edu­ca­tion that even­tu­al­ly got here to appear machine-like itself.

To col­lege-apply­ing stu­dents immediately, the 1869 entrance examination might not look whole­ly unfa­mil­iar, at the very least to the extent that it asks ques­tions about math­e­mat­ics. Chances are high, how­ev­er, that no cur­lease Har­vard hope­ful, no mat­ter how intel­li­gent, may actu­al­ly move the take a look at, giv­en the burden it locations on clas­si­cal lan­guages. By­out the 9­teenth cen­tu­ry and up till World Battle I, all younger gen­tle­males obtained an edu­ca­tion in Latin and historical Greek. However when each begin­ed to van­ish from col­lege-admis­sions exams, espe­cial­ly after the SAT grew dom­i­nant within the 9­teen-for­ties, so did the imme­di­ate incen­tive to be taught them. Mirror although that does the exi­gen­cies of a fast­ly chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal soci­ety, it additionally makes one gained­der how a lot some­one with no grasp of Latin or Greek actual­ly underneath­stands Eng­lish: a ques­tion to which the col­lege stu­dents of latest a long time professional­vide dispir­it­ing answers.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­vard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Cours­es: Explore Cours­es on Jus­tice, Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment, Lit­er­a­ture, Reli­gion, Comp­Sci & More

This Is What an 1869 MIT Entrance Exam Looks Like: Could You Have Passed the Test?

Can You Pass This Test Orig­i­nal­ly Giv­en to 8th Graders Liv­ing in Ken­tucky in 1912?

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Syl­labus Asked Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Lit­er­ary Works, Total­ing 6,000 Pages

Teacher Calls Jacques Derrida’s Col­lege Admis­sion Essay on Shake­speare “Quite Incom­pre­hen­si­ble” (1951)

Carl Sagan’s Syl­labus & Final Exam for His Course on Crit­i­cal Think­ing (Cor­nell, 1986)

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the writer of the newslet­ter Books on Cities in addition to the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social web­work for­mer­ly often known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.