1912 eighth grade exam: Could you make it to high school in 1912?

FWIW, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalo_Schifrin

Busy man..

Lalo? or Moi? (Don't answer that one)

81 for me. I'd like to see a current example of a middle school exit exam. Most of the stuff I see from my granddaughter is more difficult. She's a high school freshman.

Stuff like the Ohio River was asked locally.

Good that some get it.

I'm not giving any answers away, the rest of you did already, starting with set but galumphing on.

I'll post a photo of my mother and two aunts (one later by fissyfit marriage) in that time period, if requested.
I've posted it here on a2k.

I am taking the test. I don't think I will pass. I'll tell you my score when I am done.

76%

Great I am 1/2 done and the site won't load.

Well why don't you come back every 5 seconds and let us know how it's going?

I think I will not pass the test.

Thanks, the page is still loading,,,,,,,,as I wait.

You answered 14 of 37 questions correctly for a total score of 38%.

One can see the difference in emphasis. The 1912 test was heavy on history and geography. A test with s significant amount of math and science would have torpedoed me.

re geography, I did well on where countries, mountain ranges were (got them all correct). However, I had no idea what rivers connected what. I guess that was more important in 1912 as waterways were used more for transport of goods.
As far as who "discovered" what land, I got most of those right, deducing what nationality would have been exploring there. I knew for instance Stuyvesant never would have gone as far as the Mississippi, or Florida.

Ok, I thought the Alaska one was a trick question. Why would they have included that on a test in 1912 if it wasn't even a state then? I'll admit I picked Alaska as the biggest state, not even paying attention to the year. I mean, if this test were updated to today, would they include Guam as a potential state? I almost thought the Ponce de Leon/Florida questions were trick questions too. They seemed so obvious.

Numbers speak to me, so I was happy that all the math questions were up front. I was thinking "This'll be a piece of cake"

My worst was the English, and parts of speech stuff. While I think I'm well read, I never paid attention to what terms were used for what, relying more on what "sounds right" I also suck at spelling.

Agreed, the grammar part got me. I'm more technical and math oriented.

'Trick' questions are a part of all tests. The Ohio river was an important waterway in early America.

I have to think our education system is much more important and better today. In 1912 many people did not complete high school. It simply was not required on the farm. My dad left school in the 8th grade and he was a smart person. Had to work on the farm to eat in the 30s.

The trick question wasn't in the "where rivers flowed" part of the test, it was including Alaska in a list of states, when it wasn't a state then.
True though, they could have been seeing if kids knew that.

I would reserve judgement as to important/better than today....I more think it was just different based on the needs of the day.

It was more important to know where rivers flowed, and practical math was important in everyday applications.

I wonder what parts of the test kids of that day had more trouble with? Maybe international geography? Would someone relate to where Romania was as opposed to knowing that Balboa "discovered" the Pacific?

Since communication was slower then, maybe knowing/understanding parts of speech was more important?

Just musing.

I think that the educational prejudices of the time played a part. Universities had more of an emphasis on the traditionally "important" subjects, which included history and geography, but not higher level mathematics or the sciences. It's not that those sujects didn't get taught, they just were not as prominently emphasized or prestigious as were literature, history, geography, etc. Even in the 1950s, Latin was still being taught in high schools, although from a practical point of view, it would make more sense to teach American children Spanish. The high school i attended only dropped Latin a few years before i arrived. What language did they turn to? German--parents objected, so they started teaching French, and everyone was happy about that.

When Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. graduated Harvard, he hadn't had a "major" as we would think of it. He didn't do well in math, and he didn't do well in languages, but history and geography he could do without studying. His main interest was "natural history," which we would call biological sciences. He related himself how as a boy he had seen a seal in a market in New York, and he wanted to know everything about it. He managed to convince his father (TR, Sr.) to buy it for him, and then he cut it up. Like naturalists of his day, he got most of his specimens by shooting them. People at Harvard thought he was odd for many reasons, not the least of which was keeping shotguns and a rifle in his room, and all manner of insects and animals that he found. Alas, Harvard's natural history department probably knew less on the subject that he did. Sciences were not emphasized then.

He only took the minimum of history while there, probably disdaining it because he already knew the subject so well. He had the strange idea that he had come to Harvard to learn things he didn't yet know. On his own, and for no credit, he began research for what would be his first book, about the United States Navy in the war of 1812. Three years after leaving Harvard, while studying law at Columbia (and losing interest in it), he published The Naval War of 1812, which is in print to this day, and is considered, even on the other side of the Pond, to be the definitive work on the subject.

A different world with different values. Luckily for the United States, the country was full of odd children who loved science and math, and studied it on their own. They often took matters into their own hands. The boy who discovered the means of smelting aluminum efficiently came up with in the shed in the back yard. Aluminum is the most common metal on the surface of the earth--as a Frenchman once observed, just about every clay bank contains aluminum. He needed lots of electricity to smelt aluminum efficiently, which just wasn't available, and never would have been if Edison had had his way. Fortunately, the other great American resource, immigration, brought that weirdo Nikola Tesla to our shores, and he and George Westinghouse ignored Edison and the experts, and built a power plant at Niagara Falls. The boy from Ohio (don't recall the name) with his secret from the woodshed, was one of the first customers. (OK, Wikipedia is your friend--his name was Charles Martin Hall.)

What i find interesting is that that attitude toward education persisted long after 1912.

I think that today the "odd children" are often on the autistic spectrum, and were called Asperger's, but the DSM-V just melded it into the autistic spectrum.

I believe that that quality is inherited, and will increase exponentially, since more today, that in the past, a nerdy, autistic male can earn a livable wage in a cubicle (in a "systematizing capacity") and some intelligent female will marry him, and have children. In the past "brawn" won the girl.

My point is that the population will have more creative, intelligent kids in the future. This thread is just short-sighted, in my opinion.

P.S. Evidence for my opinion may be reflected in the number of Asians in Stuyvesant High School in NYC (65%), and do marry and have children, since Asian girls are not really interested in dating jocks, in my opinion.