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To be honest, I'm sure we all could. They "taught to the test" in those days, too.
Teaching to that test (the one in the base note) isn't a bad thing. After all, a test should measure what you were supposed to have been taught. These are essay questions, which require some writing and reasoning abilityto answer. The reason that teaching to today's tests is non-productive is that most of them are multiple choice. Teaching to a multiple choice test often involves (a) rote learning of unconnected facts, without context and/or (b) learning how to take multiple choice tests, exclusive of what was being taught. One of the most useful things I learned was that you don't have to know what the answer is if you knew or could figure out some of the things that an answer couldn't be.
I'm sure this test did exactly what it was intended to do -- make sure that Harvard was populated with kids whose families could afford to send them to a prep school that taught Latin, Greek, and other subjects that were of no use to the majority of the population. Oddly enough, the SAT supplanted tests like this to enable Harvard to diversify its student body -- to get kids from modest backgrounds who had the ability to reason and learn.
I meant the WVa one, but it does seem real as far as I can determine by googling.I don't really see why the production of oranges or the location of health spas would be useful
The West Virginia exam or the Harvard exam? Both ring true to me, for different reasons. The Harvard one, because Greek and Latin were expected as entrance subjects all the way from the 1600s onward, and the exam is just esoteric enough to sound like something that would send one to Harvard. The West Virginia one, because state education officials wouldn't have been too interested in making sure that the average West Virginian coal miner had a full high school diploma.
I don't really see why the production of oranges or the location of health spas would be useful
Not sure what’s wrong with my statement, or what, if anything, we disagree about. Most modern graduation tests are standardized tests. Most standardized tests are multiple choice. Multiple choice questions that test critical reasoning are hard to write – with critical reasoning, two reasonable people presented with the same facts could come to different conclusions. Multiple choice questions that test knowledge of facts with no context are much easier to write, so often designers of the standardized test lapse into testing for that. Preparing for a test like that would entail rote learning, which is a retreat to a style of education that you describe as typical of everyone up to the 1950’s. And I (we?) think that’s a bad thing.
Don’t disagree with you there was overt discrimination. But overt and covert discrimination are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I'd argue that if there was overt discrimination, it's likely there was covert discrimination also, because the decider had already demonstrated a bias against the excluded group. The fact that they didn’t need to exclude by examination doesn’t mean that they didn’t do it. In addition to excluding ethnic groups, the Harvards of the world also excluded socioeconomic groups. Creating entrance examinations that tested subject matter that was not available to those socioeconomic groups is an effective way of excluding them without having to admit you’re doing it. Perhaps requiring fluency in Latin and or Greek was essential to what Harvard wanted to teach. But even if it was, I doubt there were any regrets that the requirements screened out riff-raff that had the intelligence and other attributes that would permit academic success at Harvard, but who didn’t have access to a secondary school that taught Greek and Latin.
I don't really see why the production of oranges or the location of health spas would be useful
Yes. But only if West Virginia was replaced with Wisconsin.
And this surprises you? Most people from the East think the US ends at the New Jersey turnpike.
And this surprises you? Most people from the East think the US ends at the New Jersey turnpike.