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:
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
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.
