can you pass the mit entrance exam ... from 1869.

LL_Decitrig · May 23, 2019

CHC said:
Also I wonder if back then, there were whole cottage industries devoted to preparing people for these tests, like with the SAT or the MCAT today?

Yes, there were tutors and crammers. Even in my grant maintained Catholic primary school in the late 1960s we spent most of the final year cramming for the 11-plus exams so we could all get into grammar school. By the time we actually sat the exams we could do them in our sleep.

That cramming is how the school got its reputation and it's why parents wanted to send their children there. The downside is that I learned practically nothing during that whole year. I can still solve logic puzzles and parse English grammar like a champ though, in case the fate of the planet should ever hinge on that.

Freakzilla · May 23, 2019

I got a 0

Pellaidh · May 23, 2019

CHC said:
I'm also tripped up by "prove" in the first 4 geometry questions. Like how rigorous of a proof do they want? Those are hard.

There is an answer page that shows what kind of answers they were presumably expecting, if you can read cursive (probably harder for a lot of people these days than the actual questions here). Seems like pretty standard geometry proofs at least I was taught in high school. Hard to say how lenient they would have been for partial answers though.

mclem said:
(although no calculator, of course, so I'm not sure what approximation for pi they would have used back then - 22/7?)

Yes, 22/7 for pi going by the same answer page.

Evo Shandor · May 23, 2019

I did surprisingly well. I thought the math part would be harder and a few of the geomoetry parts stumped me but I was surprised how easy the remainder is. (First degree in English and Linguistics and my second is in Business, with specialization in Accounting).

LL_Decitrig · May 23, 2019

mclem said:
I'm intrigued by the fact that the English exam are partially English knowledge questions, partially general social science questions (geography, history), and partially interview-style questions ("Mention any English writers you have read"); it suggests that the English course is a more generalised course in those days rather than being focussed solely on language and literature.

I think I can hold my own in VIII (not familiar with Whittier, but I believe I have works by the others - that said, I'd have to look it up to confirm them, particularly Thackeray). I feel I should know more from VI; Othello is easy enough, and I feel I ought to know both In Memoriam and The Earthly Paradise, but I'm wondering if I'm confusing The Earthly Paradise with The Garden Of Earthly Delights.

Yeah, that struck me; the straight questions are easy (although no calculator, of course, so I'm not sure what approximation for pi they would have used back then - 22/7?), but the proofs do require considerably more thought and detail, particularly if they're to be presented in a formal manner.

In studying geometry in the late 1960s we were taught to use a list format for the proof. The sections were called Given, Required to Prove, Construction and Proof. The proof was invariably followed by the flourish QED (quod erat demonstrandum).

The given section in geometry would be basically a schematic showing any relations between sides (straight lines) and angles. Important items would be labelled with letters, Roman alphabet for sides and Greek alphabet for angles.

The constructions section could often be omitted, though for instance in proving Pythagoras' Theorem typically this is where you'd draw in the squares on the sides or inscribe the right angle triangle inside a square, or whatever. You could go to town here.

The proof would simply be a chain of observations and deductions based on the rules of Euclidean geometry.

This was usually a schoolchild's first introduction to formal thinking, so it was frightening and daunting, and many kids never really got past that. I don't know why we were taught this in the earliest years of secondary education, from age 12. In retrospect I think calculus is more intuitive and would have preferred to learn that much earlier than I did (which was age 16+).

No Depth · May 23, 2019

Where is the anime section???!

(I got the math problems and some English q's correct)

Deleted member 2809 · May 23, 2019

No Depth said:
Where is the anime section???!

(I got the math problems and some English q's correct)

Japan didn't exist in 1869, baka

donkey · May 23, 2019

VegiHam said:
Who was Alexander Hamilton, they ask.

Feel like people today might know that...

"How does a bastard orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?"

Abstrusity · May 23, 2019

I can do the geometry, algebra, and arithmetic with some scratch paper and time, but fuck if I can do the english stuff even if I had the answers in front of me.

Guess I'm not cut out for MIT, better go to SUNY instead. (:^))

Nooblet · May 23, 2019

The english questions are worded different to what we are used to these days so it's difficult to even understand what it's asking. Plus they are partly geography questions instead of english.

The mathematics on the other hand, that shit is taught in year 8 to year 10 these days in school. It's piss simple. Makes you think how middle/high school education will be like in 100 years. 12-15 year olds learning about quantum physics and such.

Death Metalist · May 23, 2019

Ah, I see you are a fan of Tibees as well.

karnage10 · May 23, 2019

Portuguese here. i think i could do half of the geomatry, all of arithemic and algebra. English i'd have a hard time.
I think the biggest question is if i could do them in the ammount of time given since i'm so out of practice i'd take a while to find the formulas.

Abstrusity · May 23, 2019

Nooblet said:
The english questions are worded different to what we are used to these days so it's difficult to even understand what it's asking. Plus they are partly geography questions instead of english.

The mathematics on the other hand, that shit is taught in year 8 to year 10 these days in school. It's piss simple. Makes you think how middle/high school education will be like in 100 years. 12-15 year olds learning about quantum physics and such.

Well remember, kids these days also tend to have access to calculators, especially for the things that aren't easy enough to do by hand. So for much of this stuff, it wasn't exactly new, but it was obscure, and requires a lot of facts and formulas. Like, how do you show the area of a circle? Public education hardly existed, and even our shoddy system of today is leagues better than what existed then. Where most kids and adults can tell you pi can can approximated to 3.14 for shorthand, or point out how to use it on a calculator, these weren't common things "back in the day." These questions are a reflection of what would be above or well above average for the time period.

As time has gone on, we've developed easier ways to teach it, more streamlined, understandable approaches (and in the process, lost some of the technicality and concepts of it until you get to the upper echelons in HS and college which I think is a mistake), so that we can have more teachers, and a higher baseline for some things(like mathematics), while the less important ones (read: English) aren't expounded upon so thoroughly.

Mr. Bad Example · May 23, 2019

quickly said:
I expect that most people know in which centuries Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Pope lived (Question 7)

Tiny bit of a trick question there...Shakespeare actually spanned two centuries. He was born in the 16th and died in the 17th.

Deleted member 18742 · May 23, 2019

The Algebra questions are way easier compared to the other sections wtf

jotun? · May 23, 2019

English - Hard fail.
Geometry - Would take a while, but I might be able to stumble through it. At first glance I don't know how to do it, but that's the kind of thing I was always able to figure out on the fly during tests.
Algebra - Cake
Arithmetic - Cake

Nooblet · May 23, 2019

Abstrusity said:
Well remember, kids these days also tend to have access to calculators, especially for the things that aren't easy enough to do by hand. So for much of this stuff, it wasn't exactly new, but it was obscure, and requires a lot of facts and formulas. Like, how do you show the area of a circle? Public education hardly existed, and even our shoddy system of today is leagues better than what existed then. Where most kids and adults can tell you pi can can approximated to 3.14 for shorthand, or point out how to use it on a calculator, these weren't common things "back in the day." These questions are a reflection of what would be above or well above average for the time period.

As time has gone on, we've developed easier ways to teach it, more streamlined, understandable approaches (and in the process, lost some of the technicality and concepts of it until you get to the upper echelons in HS and college which I think is a mistake), so that we can have more teachers, and a higher baseline for some things(like mathematics), while the less important ones (read: English) aren't expounded upon so thoroughly.

Well when I was in high school we weren't allowed to use calculators so had to do calculations by hand. And this was in mid 2000s. Infact I wasn't allowed to use anything beyond a basic calculator even for my masters in 2015 !

And I fully understand that this was the level back in the day, it's why I said 100 years from now on we'll have kids doing quantum physics for secondary school science project.

Skiptastic · May 23, 2019

Yeah, I could do some of the algebra stuff which I haven't done for years, but I would not have passed most of the other stuff.

papermoon · May 23, 2019

parse??

GarthLordOfTheSith · May 23, 2019

I'm dumb today and I'm dumb in "ye olden Times" of 1869

Why would you do that? · May 23, 2019

The math is pretty easy for me (except I forgot all the proofs I did in high school, so I couldn't do those).

However, I don't think I ever knew that the side of a hexagon that fits inside a circle is equal to that circle's radius. It's a little hard to read the handwriting, but the proof is interesting and easy to follow. I wouldn't have ever thought it was written in the mid-1800s.

I think it's kinda funny how extremely similar everything here is to my high school math from ten years ago. In fact, I feel confident in saying I had a tougher time with the NY State math tests and my SATs, lol.

The English questions... I know who Alexander Hamilton is (I actually live right near his house, and am of course an avid fan of the $10 bill). Also, America was discovered during the Ice Age, not 1492.

Poppy · May 23, 2019

i feel good knowing that i could barely manage the math needed to prove you were adequate over a hundred years ago

like this is 10th grade math and less now

i need to time travel so i can look smart

Gure · May 23, 2019

Math is actually doable but English...

Why would you do that? · May 23, 2019

papermoon said:
parse??

It's a word used a whole lot in the programming field nowadays. It basically means to analyze and "make sense of" words. A good example might be if I wotre a snetcene wtih wrdos secmlarbd up lkie tihs, then you would need to take more time than usual to parse the sentence in order for you to understand it.

Panther2103 · May 23, 2019

I would have been able to do all of the math questions easily if it were right after highschool (and I was AWFUL at math), but as I don't use math like this often enough I wouldn't be able to just do it off the top of my head anymore.

FaceHugger · May 23, 2019

Wow I don't even want to try that. It reads like a quiz trying to find the next lettered man of science in a Bram Stoker novel.

LL_Decitrig · May 23, 2019

Abstrusity said:
Well remember, kids these days also tend to have access to calculators, especially for the things that aren't easy enough to do by hand. So for much of this stuff, it wasn't exactly new, but it was obscure, and requires a lot of facts and formulas. Like, how do you show the area of a circle? Public education hardly existed, and even our shoddy system of today is leagues better than what existed then. Where most kids and adults can tell you pi can can approximated to 3.14 for shorthand, or point out how to use it on a calculator, these weren't common things "back in the day."

I can't speak with confidence for those taking a university entrance exam, but printed tabulations of mathematical constants, and corresponding lookup tables for common trigonometric functions, were commonly available by 1869. In fact, such was the demand for such tabulations that Babbage's Difference Engine was pitched as a way to mechanise their production.

And the slide rule was also in evidence during that era. Calculating the area of any circle is a simple lookup on slide rules of the era. Just offset the B scale by the marked point for pi then read off the answer on the A scale corresponding to the radius on the B scale.

Hollywood Duo · May 23, 2019

Yeah that's easy but then again I already have a higher level education. I doubt 18 year old me would have passed.

papermoon · May 23, 2019

Why would you do that? said:
It's a word used a whole lot in the programming field nowadays. It basically means to analyze and "make sense of" words. A good example might be if I wotre a snetcene wtih wrdos secmlarbd up lkie tihs, then you would need to take more time than usual to parse the sentence in order for you to understand it.

Nice :) I'd still flop English question II. Parse "apart" and "high"? Even if I had the reference passage, the question still feels so ambiguous... I need more certainty in my entrance examinations.

Abstrusity · May 23, 2019

LL_Decitrig said:
I can't speak with confidence for those taking a university entrance exam, but printed tabulations of mathematical constants, and corresponding lookup tables for common trigonometric functions, were commonly available by 1869. In fact, such was the demand for such tabulations that Babbage's Difference Engine was pitched as a way to mechanise their production.

And the slide rule was also in evidence during that era. Calculating the area of any circle is a simple lookup on slide rules of the era. Just offset the B scale by the marked point for pi then read off the answer on the A scale corresponding to the radius on the B scale.

Yes, but when I say 'obscure' I'm not saying 'in the academic community,' I'm saying that the academic community was far, far outnumbered by the general population, moreso than it is today. The lack of education in broad swathes of the US in the early 19th century was definitely a thing. If I remember right, it was New England and maybe even Massachusetts specifically, that started dragging the country forward.

It wasn't even until the middle of the century that it started becoming compulsory. It wasn't until the end of it basically that the system we know today had a skeleton.

My point wasn't that nobody knew this stuff, as pi and its use had been known of and slowly approximated over the last 2000 years before, it was that the standards appear low for mathematics because so few people actually received education along that line, that it was *reasonable* to have that on an entrance exam back then.

meowdi gras · May 23, 2019

LL_Decitrig said:
Yeah, the mathematical stuff is insultingly simple by modern standards. Having said that, the English test is attuned to somebody having a decent contemporary knowledge of pop culture and current affairs with a smattering of general knowledge. The actual grammar questions are even simpler than the algebra.

"Insultingly"? It wasn't a STEM-fixated world back then. The paradigm has slowly morphed into that from one that revolved much more around verbal and critical thinking skills. Reciprocity, and all that.

Hollywood Duo · May 23, 2019

Abstrusity said:
Yes, but when I say 'obscure' I'm not saying 'in the academic community,' I'm saying that the academic community was far, far outnumbered by the general population, moreso than it is today. The lack of education in broad swathes of the US in the early 19th century was definitely a thing. If I remember right, it was New England and maybe even Massachusetts specifically, that started dragging the country forward.

It wasn't even until the middle of the century that it started becoming compulsory. It wasn't until the end of it basically that the system we know today had a skeleton.

My point wasn't that nobody knew this stuff, as pi and its use had been known of and slowly approximated over the last 2000 years before, it was that the standards appear low for mathematics because so few people actually received education along that line, that it was *reasonable* to have that on an entrance exam back then.

Yeah I mean its ridiculous to try and say this was easy back then. Education was basically not a thing unless you were wealthy.

Link’s Awakening · May 23, 2019

Did they get to use an abacus during the test?

BLEEN · May 23, 2019

I got a 100, by cutting the paper into 1000 equal oblong rectangles, rolling J's, and passing them around campus.

How dare me.

sangreal · May 23, 2019

When I was in school and still remembered math, sure

poll tests were harder https://slate.com/human-interest/20...test-louisiana-used-to-give-black-voters.html

LL_Decitrig · May 23, 2019

Why would you do that? said:
The math is pretty easy for me (except I forgot all the proofs I did in high school, so I couldn't do those).

However, I don't think I ever knew that the side of a hexagon that fits inside a circle is equal to that circle's radius. It's a little hard to read the handwriting, but the proof is interesting and easy to follow. I wouldn't have ever thought it was written in the mid-1800s.

I suspect that proof has been around since 300 BCE. It's fairly intuitive, to the extent that I remember at the age of 15 asking my maths teacher why my constructions of the inscribed hexagon with a compass never seemed to quite work out. The answer was that my school compass wasn't built to sufficient tolerances to maintain a constant radius during the drawing process.

LL_Decitrig · May 23, 2019

srsly? said:
"Insultingly"? It wasn't a STEM-fixated world back then. The paradigm has slowly morphed into that from one that revolved much more around verbal and critical thinking skills. Reciprocity, and all that.

I did say "by modern standards." Apologies for not stating this more clearly.

Pet · May 23, 2019

English exam? You mean, history exam.

Doggg · May 23, 2019

I ain't parsing shit

iksenpets · May 23, 2019

The algebra and arithmetic are straightforward enough. Got all those, except the question about August where I just didn't understand the phrasing of what they were asking for. The geometry I probably could've done in 9th grade when I was in geometry class, but geometric proofs just aren't given a prominent place in modern curricula. You do that stuff once at age 13 and never look at it again.

The English section is just sort of funny. Authors and books they clearly consider canonical are pretty much historical footnotes now. I could tell you a lot about Alexander Hamilton, know Pope is some sort of literary guy, and have never of Humboldt. I could tell you Bismarck unified Germany and Victor Emmanuel was the first king of a unified Italy, and have a vague sense that Gladstone was a British Prime Minister, but also consider all three of those to be points of knowledge so obscure I'm kind of ashamed to admit to knowing them. But they'd be current events at the time of this test. And I don't know if those answers would have been considered sufficient or if they're looking for paragraph-length biographies. Same with the geography stuff. Is it enough to say Oxford is in England? I can tell you the Danube empties into the Black Sea and forms the northern boundary of the Balkan region, but do I need like every major city that sits on it in proper West-to-East order? And the idea that people memorized the areas of states is hilarious.

meow · May 23, 2019

Completely failed that English one. Gave up halfway down the page (tho I appreciate the one that is just "mention which English writers" you have read).

Sectorseven · May 23, 2019

I probably could have passed it when I was fresh out of high school.

shaneo632 · May 23, 2019

The language seems to unnecessarily convoluted, but I guess that's part of the test.

LL_Decitrig · May 23, 2019

meow said:
Completely failed that English one. Gave up halfway down the page (tho I appreciate the one that is just "mention which English writers" you have read).

Yep. John Irving, Sinclair Lewis, Salman Rushdie, Octavia Butler, HG Wells, Ursula Leguin, and Iain Banks are all great writers known now, but would not be known to the examiners for obvious reasons. Even Samuel Cleminson and Frank Baum were not yet known well.

Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) had just published Alice in Wonderland and perhaps the novelty value of an MIT applicant aware of Dodgson's work in pure mathematics as well as his fondness for riddles and acrostics might impress an admissions tutor, if it didn't just zoom over their head. There were undoubtedly far cleverer writers than Lewis Carroll known in 1869. It's just that we know how much he has inspired successive generations while those other writers have fallen out of favour.

siteseer · May 23, 2019

Death Metalist said:
Ah, I see you are a fan of Tibees as well.

this video popped on my youtube feed for some reason. probably because i watched a video on how to solve an amazon interview question involving recursion and the fibonacci sequence. i thought i'd give resetera a quiz. honestly i could only definitely pass maybe 10% of this thing off the top of my head, but i'm proud that i remembered pi r ^2 for finding the area of a circle using its radius.

LL_Decitrig · May 23, 2019

siteseer said:
but i'm proud that i remembered pi r ^2 for finding the area of a circle using its radius.

To be honest, if nearly everybody knows this, and knows that pi is about 3 and is defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, I can pronounce myself happy. That basic insight and our enduring fascination with such deep secrets of the natural world are far more important than the ephemeral concerns of 1869 and 2019.

Mr. Poolman · May 23, 2019

Yes, I can.

Cels · May 23, 2019

the math is easy as long as you attended a nontrash high school. i graduated highschool more than a decade ago, didn't study math in college, and all of the math was fine.

i don't know the area of massachusetts or of england. i just guessed and i was pretty far off.
these cities are famous world cities and I think most people would know where they are. Pretty easy.
i am totally unfamiliar with the course of these rivers. my geography is weak though. maybe americans studied geography more back then.
i know hamilton and pope. don't know humboldt.
i know all three figures. they are famous figures of the 19th century and surely a teenager in 1869 would know them as well.
i suppose they are looking for 1492, which we know is wrong. any americans would know the declaration of independence and the constitution.
english authors/poets i could go as long as time allowed. although i suppose i'm a limited a bit by pre-1869 answers...
answers i didn't know - kenilworth, the earthly paradise, lycida, childe harold, lady of the lake -- so I only got 3/8 correct. there seems to be a big emphasis on contemporaries though.
i got shakespeare and wordsworth but not pope.
i think there are some "obvious" answers for this last question -- most will answer canterbury tales, vanity fair, rip van winkle/sleepy hollow for chaucer/thackeray/irving. tennyson has a handful of really well known poems. as for whittier i didn't even know he was a poet. again, he was a contemporary so a teenager of that time probably would know whittier.

quickly said:
The Lady of Shallot Sir Walter Scott, William Morris, Thackeray or Whittier anymore; I couldn't identify the author of Lycidas despite having read Milton in college.

lady of the lake is in the question, not lady of shallot. funny enough, the wikipedia entry for the poem notes that it became much less popular in the late 19th century....so fairly shortly after this entrance exam. ivanhoe is still taught frequently though.

BaltimoreLarry · May 23, 2019

I'm pretty sure I could have passed this in 10th grade. I think people saying the English is hard stopped reading after the first question.

Pelicano · May 23, 2019

I gave up on the English part and I'm terrible at math.

can you pass the mit entrance exam ... from 1869.

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