1869 MIT entrance exam

Pie & Hammer has a scan of an entrance exam for MIT. Link (Thanks, Lily!)

[#1 posted by phasor3000 , September 27, 2007 4:45 PM]

"Describe the course of the Rhine?" Uh oh...

[#2 posted by Son of Bride of Dick Cheney , September 27, 2007 4:47 PM]

I have the opposite reaction to this exam than Pie & Hammer draw. To me, this reflects the ludicrous pile of knowledge that an undergraduate is expected to have today. When I entered university (13 years ago) I was expected to know electrochemistry, newtonian physics, and calculus. The geometry proofs in this MIT exam were 8th grade material when I was coming up, and the arithmetic was even earlier.

[#3 posted by Tommy , September 27, 2007 5:07 PM]

I would have been able to do the math parts easily at that age.

And I was certainly not MIT material.
(I know because they told me so.)

[#4 posted by lummels , September 27, 2007 5:19 PM]

Uhm, is everyone forgetting what education must have been like in 1869?? Yes, today many of the math questions are routine for 9th graders, but consider that these MIT hopefuls probably had to scratch their answers on rocks with charcoal. ;o)

Hell, when I went to high school we were still programming Fortran. DO that a loop!

[#5 posted by Tommy , September 27, 2007 5:27 PM]

We didn't even get to use zeros and ones. We had to use Os and lower-case Ls.

[#6 posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden/Moderator , September 27, 2007 5:33 PM]

You had Fortran? We would have killed for Fortran!

[#7 posted by Anonymous , September 27, 2007 6:11 PM]

The 8th question was cut off in the picture. It was "Compute the area of Abe Lincoln's beard"

[#8 posted by Anonymous , September 27, 2007 6:15 PM]

Occasionally you come across people bemoaning the declining standards of American education.

This is pretty good evidence that math standards have increased tremendously.

[#9 posted by dculberson , September 27, 2007 6:59 PM]

I had to use TIBasic!!

[#10 posted by KeithIrwin , September 27, 2007 7:05 PM]

No one has actually ever killed for Fortran. This is how it should be.

Keith

[#11 posted by Tits McGee , September 27, 2007 8:26 PM]

Neat. I'm going to see what my precalculus students can do with this tomorrow.

[#12 posted by OM , September 27, 2007 9:02 PM]

...Ah, Fortran. The only language I had seven years of programming experience, and never once used it on the job. But that's how Nell Dale's worthless CS program at Texas U. was designed - teach the kids four years of useless crap, and then look puzzled because they couldn't get the degree certified as anything but a Bachelor of the *Arts* degree.

But what the frack? Minnesota Northstar Fortran IV on a CDC6600 was *still* a shitload of fun. Especially when you managed to get the proper access so you could tinker with Colossal Cave...:-)

[#13 posted by Anonymous , September 28, 2007 6:58 AM]

Something else about the context of this entrance exam that folks are forgetting is age . . . of the student. In the 19th century (and before), it was exceedingly common for students to enroll in "Colleges" (such as M.I.T.) in their mid-teens. (Interestingly enough, as I'm sure Xeni knows, the American Spanish word for "high school" is "colegio," reflecting this 19th century reality.)

With this knowledge under one's belt, it's not really surprising to realize that an entrance exam for 19th cent. M.I.T. might well cover ground that pre-calculus and trigonometry students of today are expected to master. In fact, it makes perfect sense to me.

dkp

[#14 posted by anthronaut , September 28, 2007 7:33 AM]

I wouldn't be solve do all that without a calculator.

[#15 posted by cayton , September 28, 2007 8:46 AM]

I don't think I would be able to do several of these without a calculator. The cube root of 4?!?! I wonder what kind of precision they were required to have, and if there was a time limit?

....kind of depressing knowing that I wasn't MIT material 138 years ago.

[#16 posted by bcrowell , September 28, 2007 9:29 AM]

@14: Look again. They don't have to find the cube root of 4, they have to find the cube root of 8. (But if you did need to find the cube root of 4 by hand, a good approach would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_method ; outside an exam situation, people in 1869 would probably have used a table of logarithms.)

The Euclidean geometry proofs would, I suspect, be a real challenge for many MIT students today. In any case, the value of such a thing is probably that it shows that they can reason within an axiomatic system; any other axiomatic system would do just as well. I wonder what the expectations were for these proofs re what you were allowed to assume. In Euclid, each proof typically makes use of many preceding results, but if that was allowed, then many of the proofs on this exam might become trivial -- at least one of them *is* a theorem from Euclid. If they're only allowed to use the 5 axioms, I wonder if they're restricted to a certain formulation. There's more than one way to formulate the parallel postulate, for example.

Some of the arithmetic questions seem like modern grade school material (e.g., adding fractions), but if you ask a calculus professor today for the reason that some students fail calculus, the usual answer is that they have a weak foundation in arithmetic and algebra.

I had a student a few years back who wanted to transfer as a physics major to Cal Tech from the community college where I teach. They mailed me an entrance exam, and I had to proctor it. Oh. My. Gawd. There were a lot of problems that I would have been able to do 20 years ago, when certain things were fresher in my mind, but can't do now because I'm rusty. E.g., there were a lot of contour integrals, and various integrals of real functions that required tricky substitutions.

[#17 posted by el_beardo , September 28, 2007 10:31 AM]

Thank god for my Calculator Watch and my Civil War era Canteen!