What it took to complete 8th grade...in 1895 Kansas, could you do it?

[Winterblues]

This is really something. Dolly/Daralene

What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895. Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895? This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina 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 'lie,''play,' 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 hour 15 minutes)

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 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 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 the cost of 6,720 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 metre?

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 acre, the distance of 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.

7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton , Bell ,Lincoln , Penn, and Howe?

8. Name event s 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.' (HUH?)

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, sup.

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 Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco .

6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.

7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the 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 the inclination of the earth.



Notice that the exam took FIVE HOURS to complete. Gives the saying 'he only had an 8th grade education' a whole new meaning, doesn't it?!

[MineralMan]

1. Snopes says FALSE

http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp

[AndyA]

2. It makes Jethro Bodine's sixth grade education seem pretty impressive.

I doubt many of today's students could answer these questions at an acceptable level. I see college graduates that cannot spell common words properly, don't know how (or are too lazy) to use proper punctuation, and basically seem to have poor knowledge of history, civics, and grammar.

[slackmaster]

37. I knew my Gazintas when I entered first grade, thanks to Jethro

:hi:

[skooooo]

3. I wonder what the average age was..

..for completing 8th grade. I bet it was a bit older than it is today.

--

Yep, we like being real dumb in Amerika!

[nichomachus]

4. Long-time internet hoax n/t

[JSK]

5. Principal part of the verb "lie"

My personal PET PEEVE! Oh my, people used to care...

[fasttense]

6. This has been proven to be fake. Just another right wing lie. n/t

[Dhalgren]

7. This is a crap hoax...

http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp

[CJCRANE]

11. Doesn't say the actual exam paper is false n/t

[Spangle]

15. Your RIGHT!

It doesn't say the test is false.

Instead, it's talking about the 'dumbing' of America part is false. That the students back then, didn't learn as much variety as the students today learn. Then compares it to a 12 grad passing test of today and how parents would be upset if it wasn't broader.

The whole thing is weird. What is up with snopes on this one???

[NeedleCast]

21. What Snopes is trying to explain

is that asking a set of general questions that the viewer probably hasn't been exposed to is generally going to make the viewer look bad.

In high school I took pretty advanced math classes, trig, calc, etc. However, I haven't used that information in 17ish years. I doubt I recall 10% of it. So if someone came and dropped a trig test in front of me today, I'd probably fail in massive fashion. Does that mean I'm dumb?

Snopes shows us that education is often specialized. Most of my career has been working in the imagery intelligence and IT world. I imagine my abilities in the field of imagery intelligence is better than that of 99.9% of the people on this board (especially as it applies to defense) and that my general IT knowledge is better than 90% of this board. Does that mean the rest of you are dumb? Of course not, it just goes to show that we tend to lack the ability to recall knowledge outside of fields we commonly use.

That's what Snopes is trying to point out.

[GentryDixon]

8. I have a greater respect for my Great Grandmother.

She was a school teacher in the Unorganized Territory of Nebraska in 1880. She taught for many years before and after she married my Great Grandfather.

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

9. My grandfather actually did have an 8th grade education formally.

Nevertheless he was the smartest man I've ever known, even now that I've known the company of scholars and professors.

He didn't get smart from any 1920s rural Massachusetts public education system but by reading everything he could get his hands on. That's probably the best thing he ever taught me.

[pipi_k]

14. Hey!

It sounds like we're talking about the same man, doesn't it?

sorta spooky...


:)



On edit:

PS...look a little further down thread...

[salvorhardin]

10. Snopes is your friend

Claim: An 1895 graduation examination for public school students demonstrates a shocking decline in educational standards.

Status: False.

Origins: This item, purportedly a final examination for graduating eighth grade students (or graduating high school students, depending upon which version you have) is of interest because it's supposed to be documentary evidence of how shockingly our educations have declined over the last century or so. Why, most adults couldn't muster a passing score on this test today, people think; that mere schoolkids were expected to pass it is proof that the typical school curriculum has been steeply "dumbed down" over the years, pundits claim:


The object of this exercise was only to reveal what many of us have known for some time. The dumbing down of American public education over the past 100 years has been substantial, particularly in the last 50 years. When Great-grandma says she only had an eighth-grade education, don't smirk.

What nearly all these pundits fail to grasp is "I can't answer these questions" is not the same thing as "These questions demonstrate that students in earlier days were better educated than today's students." Just about any test looks difficult to those who haven't recently been steeped in the material it covers. If a 40-year-old can't score as well on a geography test as a high school student who just spent several weeks memorizing the names of all the rivers in South America in preparation for an exam, that doesn't mean the 40-year-old's education was woefully deficient — it means the he simply didn't retain information for which he had no use, no matter how thoroughly it was drilled into his brain through rote memory some twenty-odd years earlier. I suspect I'd fail a lot of the tests I took back in high school if I had to re-take them today without reviewing the material beforehand. I certainly wouldn't be able to pass any arithmetic test that required me to be familiar with such arcane measurements as "rods" and "bushels," but I can still calculate areas and volumes just fine, thank you.

...

Consider: To pass this test, no knowledge of the arts is necessary (not even a nodding familiarity with a few of the greatest works of English literature), no demonstration of mathematical learning other than plain arithmetic is required (forget algebra, geometry, or trigonometry), nothing beyond a familiarity with the highlights of American history is needed (never mind the fundamentals of world history, as this exam scarcely acknowledges that any country other than the USA even exists), no questions about the history, structure, or function of the United States government are asked (not even the standard "Name the three branches of our federal government"), science is given a pass except for a few questions about geography and the rudiments of human anatomy, and no competence in any foreign language (living or dead) is necessary. An exam for today's high school graduates that omitted even one of these subjects would be loudly condemned by parents and educators alike, subjects about which the Salina, Kansas, students of 1895 needed know nothing at all. Would it be fair to say that the average Salina student was woefully undereducated because he failed to learn many of the things that we consider important today, but which were of little importance in his time and place? If not, then why do people keep asserting that the reverse is true? Why do journalists continue to base their gleeful articles about how much more was expected of the students of yesteryear on flawed assumptions? Perhaps some people are too intent upon making a point to bother considering the proper questions. ...
http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp

[Mojorabbit]

12. I have my grandfather's school books

He went to a one room school with all grades combined. He also had an 8th grade education. He was fluent in German and Latin from the course work. The books have course work much more difficult than what I had in twelve years of public school in the 60's and early 70's. He ended up being a mail carrier in the twenties and also ran moonshine on the side during prohibition.

[pipi_k]

13. I checked it...Snopes does say it's false, but....

My father was born in 1925.

He had an 8th grade education himself...yet he was one of the brightest men I've ever personally known.

Mostly because he was an avid reader.

And he did crossword and other word puzzles.

He was a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge.

He would have put many High School, even many College, graduates to shame.


There were times I was ashamed that he had never graduated from high school...I needn't have been...

:)

[Spangle]

19. My father as well.

But I wasn't ashamed. He seemed to know a ton of stuff. Loved doing math puzzles. REtired 20 years Navy and was in the first group to become an E9.

They might not have covered as many subjects as we did. But they covered those subjects very indepthly. And they were not allowed to do it sloppy or with short cuts.

I'll skip the out house stories.. the one where he locked the teacher in and then it got flipped over. Not a nice story to tell. However, he was one of the boys that showed up first at school to warm it up, etc.

[Buzz Clik]

16. "5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas". Hell, that's easy:

On August 21, 1863, Quantrill's Raiders burned Lawrence to the ground. It was Kansas's finest hour.

We can only pray that it will be repeated.

[AngryAmish]

17. The truth is, people back then were much dumber than people today

It is actually true - look up the Flynn effect. IQ tests have to be renormed every ten years or so because the average person keeps getting smarter.

[RJ Connors]

18. Education use to be more difficult in America, no doubt about it.

I remember my mother telling me where she was raised in western Tenn. in the 1920's, in high school Latin was a required course of study. Are they any high schools that still require Latin?

I have seen examples of this same thing at the collegiate level as well. I think it is all part of the dumbing down of America and given our current situation it looks like it has worked rather well.

[NeedleCast]

20. Why does knowledge of a dead language = "education used to be more difficult?"

In my high school you had to take one language class. Latin was an option. I think maybe one in 100 people took it.

The truth is that people as a whole are a lot smarter now than they were in at the turn of the 20th century. You just have to look at the larger picture. Literacy rates are usually a pretty good base indicator.

[RJ Connors]

38. Because what you get from it is the knowledge that it really isn't

a dead language, you've just been dumbed down to believe it is. A good foundation in Latin is a good foundation in many languages, English being one of them. If one knows Latin one would have the knowledge that Res ipsa loquitur.

[NoPasaran]

22. Well, back in 1895 the list of European republics would be pretty short

I'm thinking just France, Switzerland and San Marino.

[PVnRT]

23. Anyone who doesn't know the volume of a bushel of wheat must be a moron

:eyes:

[muriel_volestrangler]

24. What it doesn't say is the scores that pupils achieved on it

Nor does it say it was given to all pupils.

Though records indicate that the exam in question was given only one year, a typeset copy was discovered almost a century after its creation by local historian Helen Crawford. Afterward, descendants of J.W. Armstrong, the former county school superintendent and test creator, discovered the handwritten draft of the grammar part of the test piled amid some of their grandfather's papers.
...
One of those intrigued by the exam is Forrest Bishop, a self-employed inventor in Seattle. He believes in the test's authenticity -- its style, linguistics and subject matter fit the era it was created in perfectly.

"If I was to take this thing, I'd probably pull about a C+. But it was only (given) one time, one year. That, to me, takes away from its standing as a sort of standard of excellence," Bishop said. "It's almost like it was an experimental test."

http://www.salina.com/Print/1895-Eighth-grade-test-SE1-0123082008-02-22T16-03-32

[NeedleCast]

26. Its' been shown to be a hoax

But the quote you posted is essentially correct. This test might have been a good indication of general knowledge needed to get by in Kansas in 1920, but that has little bearing on today's education system.

[muriel_volestrangler]

30. The Salina Journal claims it's real

That was what I linked to; and they link to a supposed scan of the printed test (which doesn't look over 100 years old to me, I have to say). But the context of it (was it considered a good test? Was it repeated?) is unknown, so it's of limited value.

[NeedleCast]

32. THat's what Snopes is saying

The test was real, but the way it was being sent around in e-mail fowardings suggests that because a Kansas 8th grader in 1895 could (presumably) pass this test and an 8th grader today couldn't means that we are dumber than we were in 1895.

The Snopes article goes on to point out that knowledge is generally pretty specific and that in the long term we generally don't have good retention of things we don't use or come across regularly.

In other words, the fact that most of us don't know how many bushels of wheat it takes to fill a truck bed doesn't mean we're dumb, it means we don't live in Kansas in 1895.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

25. I wonder if people were more gullible in 1895 Kansas.

Looks like they've got some stiff competition from you.

[Winterblues]

27. While this particular "test" may have turned out to be false

I would suggest that every question on it were asked at the time of the students. I remember when I was a child I learned about bushels and rods and parts of speech. What are the parts of speech by the way? I still remember do you? Can you actually answer any of the questions? They are not false questions by the way, they have legitimate answers. I hardly think the Poster is naive as you say. I think this is a very thought provoking post.

[PVnRT]

28. Yes, it is

It provokes thoughts like, "How come boomers and their parents bitch about how stupid kids are today, but are the ones who have spent decades trying to destroy public education and instituting standardized tests?"

Thought-provoking, indeed.

It's good you learned about bushels and rods; two units of measurement no one, not even the United States, even uses anymore. Parts of speech? I didn't realize being able to properly define past participles was useful for anything other than doing well on Jeopardy.

It's this trivia-driven attitude, along with the right-wing rage against paying taxes for anything other than the military, that is responsible for public education today. I don't give two shits if a high school graduate can properly diagram a sentence, as long as they can communicate intelligently and effectively.

EDIT: Typo (yes, we damn young 'uns do catch them, surprise!)

[Winterblues]

31. What does a past participle have to do with the "eight parts of speech"?

You know like noun, pronoun, verb, etc. I take it you just plain don't know. Also makes one wonder if what the kids are learning today will have any relevance fifty years from now...

[madinmaryland]

34. I thought there were only "three parts of speech?"

A noun, a verb, and 9/11.

:evilgrin:

[PVnRT]

35. Yes, I do know

Do you know what the significance of my username is? How about a Gaussian probability distribution? How would you find the area under a curve?

All of those would have been known by 1895. Why aren't they on the test?

My point, which you missed, is that it is far more important that someone be able to discuss the major themes of the works of Orwell than it is to be able to name the eight parts of speech or the capital of Liberia, which is basically what this test amounts to - rote memorization of trivia. Why it is you think that is "good education" I'll never know.

[NeedleCast]

36. I don't know the eight parts of speech

Tell you what. We'll put your eight parts of speech up against my ability to run a computer network, program, and general IT knowledge and see which is worth more...

You may know about rods and bushels. I know how to recover a server farm when it crashes. Which do you think is more marketable? I'm not trying to dog you out, just driving to the obvious conclusion that if you're not working in an industry where you need to know the eight parts of speech, then you don't need to know the eight parts of speech to be intelligent as it applies to your field. I'm also not saying that having a broad range of knowledge isn't a good thing, but suggesting that someone is dumb or not as smart as someone else based on one specific area of knowledge is pretty fucking stupid.

What kids are learning today, except for the fundamentals, probably WONT have any relevance fifty years from now.

[NeedleCast]

33. Could the average Kansas 8th grader

use a web browser or write HTML code?

Intelligence is relative to what you're being taught.

[SteelPenguin]

29. That would be a horrible test for today's students

I could probably pass it right now, and give me a day to study for it and I could certainly get a good grade.

As Snopes mentions, tests shown to people who haven't studied make them feel dumb. I'm willing to bet that any test posted from a class today would meet with simliar bewilderment, or even more so.

These questions are nothing compared to the tests I had to take coming out of high school. Calculus, American History, European History, Literature, Foreign Language, and more. If this was an 8th grade test it would make more sense (though snopes says it is presented as either an 8th grade or a high school test).

Still it's more than meaningless today. Present a test from today which includes questions regarding mendelian genetics, computer use, world history, to the adults of 100 years ago and it would be more than a little gobbledygook. It doesn't mean they were stupid, just as this test doesn't mean our kids and we are stupid.

Snopes whole point is that using this test as a comparison of todays eduction is meaningless, and I concur.