8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS - 1895 Check this out!!

Public schools have sure come a long way since 1895. Could You Have Passed the 8th Grade in 1895? These are the eighth-grade final exams from 1895 from Salina, KS. USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS and reprinted by the Salina Journal:

8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS - 1895

Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per
bu., deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per m?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per are, the distance around
which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt

U.S. History. (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion? (I think this is the Civil War).
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates:
1607, 1620 1800 1849 1865

Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography,
etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono,super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd,cell,
rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fermandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.

Imagine a college student who went to public school today trying to pass this test, even if the few outdated questions were modernized. Gives the saying of an early 20th century person that "she/he only had an 8th grade education" a whole new meaning!

 

LOL!!

The math part is easy. For most of the rest, I could probably pass if it was graded on a curve.

I really don't know if this was comparable to most curriculum however. I would guess that it wasn't. Or, another possibility, this was the focus of what was taught. Do schools focus on this now? No. Scarce resources and all, namely time, economics 101.

Are we better or worse off? Well, we are definitely more specialized.

A little scared
Tony

 

...and Harvard used to require fluency in Latin and Greek (as well as having accepted Jesus as one's savior) for admission, not graduation.

And yet I wonder about the level of answers that people wrote. For instance, the question:

4. Describe the mountains of North America.

for which one has (prorating the 10 questions that are to be answered in one hour) six minutes to answer. I tried writing what I know about mountains, in my more legible handwriting, and at the end of a minute, I had written 26 words (admittedly one of them being "Appalachians"). So, figure about one hundred fifty words to answer this question, in depth. 150 words is really not all that much. As a matter of fact, this very posting that I am posting to this very news group has a total of 150 words. Well it does now that I add 'God bless America."

 

Remember, Grade 8 was a terminal grade for most and it was the end of their education and they had to be prepared for life.

Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald sat through a long winded speech in Greek and replied that it was the finest Greek he had ever heard spoken. As a it happens, he did not understand Greek, just politics.

A relative, who went to school in the thirties had to take Latin. In 1970, an entry requirement for the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta was a second language. It may still be??

 

Trinity Ph.D. Requirement

Ironically, this was the one and only requirement to earn my Ph.D. at Trinity College and University. You mean my Ph.D. isn't even equivalent to an 8th Grade education?

 

True. And many, many did not even make it that far. While some of that information is important, some of it is certainly not. Also, remember that the education system was quite different. The memorization of facts was considered important. Note how little analysis is actually involved in the test. Even the causes and results of the Revolutionary War is memorized information.

It's important to remember that almost all of the students would have spoken English as a first language (the ones with English as second language mostly quit before then). Few recent immigrants (they were already out working). Few coming from homes with only one parent.

If you set up an educational system with the goal of being able to answer those questions, you could probably be quite successful. I'm not sure I would call the graduates educated, though.


Tom Nixon

 

I remember reading a statement somewhere about the Yale-educated theologian/philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, who served as the first president of Princeton until his death in the 1750's. Jonathan was a brilliant and highly educated individual, well read not only in the classics, but also in the most cutting-edge scientific knowledge available in his day. However, according to one of his biographers, the information contained in one week's worth of the New York Times is greater than the sum total of all print information available in Edwards' day. Thus, it was much easier to be an "expert" in that day and age.

In light of the information explosion of recent decades, today's students are faced with a far more complex range of information than students of even 100 years ago. The answer to the question of what constitutes "essential" knowledge is somewhat subjective, and is one with which teachers, school systems, and state authorities grapple on an on-going basis.

Cory Seibel

 

Well, check this out. Snopes, at least, believes the exam to be either an outright hoax or a certification exam for teachers. Makes me wonder if some 100 years from now someone will be holding a copy of the "exam" (reproduced below) claiming it was actually given to high school students.

The City of New York High School Math Proficiency Exam

NAME:____________________
GANG NAME:______________________

1.) Little Johnny has an AK-47 with a 30 round clip. He usually misses 6 out of every 10 shots and he uses 13 rounds per drive-by shooting. How many drive-by shootings can Little Johnny attempt before he has to reload?

2.) Jose has 2 ounces of cocaine. If he sells an 8 ball to Antonio for $320 and 2 grams to Juan for $85 per gram, what is the street value of the rest of his hold?

3.) Rufus pimps 3 hoes. If the price is $85 per trick, how many tricks per day must each ho turn to support Rufus's $800 per day crack habit?

4.) Jerome wants to cut the pound of cocaine he bought for $40,000 to make 20% profit. How many ounces will he need?

5.) Willie gets $200 for a stolen BMW, $150 for stealing a Corvette, and $100 for a 4x4. If he steals 1 BMW, 2 Corvettes and 3 4x4's, how many more corvettes must he have to steal to have $900?

6.) Raoul got 6 years for murder. He also got $10,000 for the hit. If his common-law wife spends $100 per month, how much money will be left when he gets out?
Extra credit bonus: how much more time will he get for killing the hoe that spent his money?

7.) If an average can of spray paint covers 22 square feet and the average letter is 3 square feet, how many letters can be sprayed with 3 eight ounce cans of spray paint with 20% paint free?

8.) Hector knocked up 3 girls in the gang. There are 27 girls in his gang. What is the exact percentage of girls Hector knocked up?

9.) Bernie is a lookout for the gang. Bernie has a Boa Constrictor that eats 3 small rats per week at a cost of $5 per rat. If Bernie makes $700 a week as a lookout, how many weeks can he feed the Boa on one week's income?

10.) Billy steals Joe's skateboard. As Billy skates away at 35 mph, Joe loads his .357 Magnum. If it takes Joe 20 seconds to load his magnum, how far away will Billy be when he gets whacked?

 

While I suspect that's an exaggeration, the point is certainly sound if you look further back.

Until the spread of printing in mid 15'th century Europe, books were hand-written manuscripts. That meant that every individual copy represented a tremendous amount of work. To have one or two books was expansive, and even storied libraries might only have a few hundred. Books were treasures.

So medieval scholars were not widely read in our sense. They studied only a handful of books, but they did so very intensely, sometimes to the point of memorizing them. So works by authors like Aristotle were analyzed minutely, and every possible implication was carefully worked out.

I think that the whole nature of reading has changed. Today we are supplied with far more text than we can ever assimilate. The vast majority of that material is frankly inane. So people have developed a style of reading that is the exact opposite of the medievals': we read very widely, rarely think deeply about anything that we read, and then blow it all off.

I think that students depend on their professors to sift through all the ephemera and to locate material of real significance. And students need to be pushed into thinking more deeply than is their habit about the stuff they read.

But I agree that the question of what is truly significant has become hotly contested territory in our culture, particularly in the humanities. Since it represents indoctrination of students (the professors will deny that, but it's true), it carries tremendous implications for social change. If professors can change the way that the educated classes think and conceptualize their world, they can alter history.

Hence the tremendous politicization of the battles over "the canon" in the contemporary university.

But can it be controlled any longer, in this day and age? Or will the multiplication of educational alternatives, as evidenced by not only DL but by every Borders or Barnes and Noble, lead to a culturally fragmented world in which the members of the educated classes share less and less with one another?