Never On Sunday

Heh. Someone rummaged up a copy of the 1869 Harvard entrance exam (sometimes mislabeled 1899, the date of archiving), which is making the rounds under headings like “will probably make you feel dumb.”

Nothing could be farther from the truth. (Though readers who know me might object that I went to the he-man technical school nearby. Fellow students who took electives at Harvard reported that it was for wimps.) The test comes in two sections: classics and mathematics, the gentleman’s liberal education.

I’d fail the classics test, but only because we were taught modern language and American history in high school. About Latin I know virtually nothing, and about ancient Greek I know nothing at all…but I could answer comparable questions about declining German nouns and conjugating German verbs, because German is what I took in high school. Twenty-five years ago. Where classics shade into history, my knowledge is spottier, but comprehensive enough to answer questions I, II, III, and any other two. Yes, I know now who Jugurtha was, though admittedly I didn’t when I was seventeen.

And the math? Puh-leeze! Define a prime number? Simplify a product of polynomials? Construct a circle circumscribing a given triangle? Kid’s stuff. Literally. Okay, so I happen to be a math teacher, and have to know this professionally. Note well, however: I placed out of math classes at MSU; I knew it before becoming a math teacher. This is nothing to brag about. I’ve got intermediate-track sophomores doing some of this stuff, in a school officially failing to meet state and national standards. Couldn’t say how the geometry is going, since I don’t teach it yet, but dividing polynomials was last month’s homework.

The only gap a college-bound senior should face, apart perhaps from some of the geometric constructions, which require a bit of inspiration as well as understanding, is some of the material about logarithms, because, like ancient Greek, nobody needs to remember the log base 10 of 7. That was a skill for another era, before calculators, before even sliderules, when multiplication of large numbers was approximate and done through logarithmic translation. (Trivia: calculators and computers don’t multiply; they add—using this same process. So did sliderules, for that matter.) Practice long enough, and you’d memorize values like log(.02183) by osmosis, but knowing it in 1869 was no proof of understanding, and not knowing it today is no proof of lack of understanding.

It’s not even a good test. One question consists of three names: “Leonidas, Pausanias, Lysander.” Well, what about them? Another question asks students to compare Sparta and Athens, when I suspect they were supposed to contrast the great cities.

So. “Make you feel stupid”? Hardly. I’m trying to figure out how to hand this exam, or at least the arithmetic and algebra portions of it, to my basic kids as a morale-builder. “Look: you’re smart enough to get into Harvard!”

Of course, that was a different era. An era when being able to multiply binomials was the mark of an educated man. An era when professors mastered Greek but couldn’t be bothered to master English. An era when Harvard was hurting for enrollment, and used this test to advertize how accessible it was. But no need to harp on that for students already prepared to give up because they “aren’t worthy” of college, much less the Ivy League.