<p>I agree. It is not a difficult test. I would have missed the last one as I have never been told how many cubic feet are in a cord of wood. But I am not in an environment where that is applicable. The rest are simple math equations that my son learned prior to 8th grade.</p>
<p>Most kids, if they made it as far as 8th grade, would then leave and join the workforce. A girl could be a schoolteacher after passing 8th grade, as she would certainly know more than her pupils.</p>
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<p>I think many people are whiling away their time in high school, learning very little but sticking it out so that they are not stamped as “high school drop-outs”. This was true even in the upper-middle-class high school I went to. I do think a system where they were gainfully employed from a younger age, at least part time, would be a better one.</p>
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<p>They would get multiple tries, and knowing that their performance by the end of 8th grade had real consequences would motivate them to work harder in school.</p>
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<p>Those would reasonable requirements for Juilliard. I’m not saying that only students who can solve quadratic equations should enter high school. A hundred years ago, people thought junior high school completers should have mastered arithmetic, as evidenced by the test questions. I agree with them.</p>
<p>I have a keen interest in IQ, and most of what I have read supports the notion that children are smarter today. But there is a recent paper asserting the opposite in the UK:</p>
<p>[Were</a> the Victorians cleverer than us? Research indicates a decline in brainpower and reflex speed | Mail Online | May 13, 2013](<a href=“Were the Victorians cleverer than us? Research indicates a decline in brainpower and reflex speed | Daily Mail Online”>Were the Victorians cleverer than us? Research indicates a decline in brainpower and reflex speed | Daily Mail Online)</p>
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<p>If we are any “dumber” than a century ago, it would be the negative effect of the information era. Some of us doesn’t even know the most basic things (like how many feet in a meter, how to convert second into hours, the first 5 presidents of the US). With Calculators and nearly total access to google/search engine, it would be useless to actual remember the things that barely matter to us (Who actually care who the 4th, 5th president were or how many feet in a meter, honestly?) </p>
<p>Ah to the OP link: There is an issue of not being taught some of those things throughout school.
-We know the basic of the war of 1812. For a battle’s name, people will probably say “The battle of Washington D.C.” since they MAY remember that it burn down during the British attack. But my school focused more on the Civil War and teaches '1812 in a manner that made it almost negligible.
-“Describe the heart.” Simple; it pump blood throughout the body. Another correct answer would be that it where humans find the strength to do what they truly want.
-“A man sold a watch for $180, and lost 16 2/3%…”: I can tell you right now, that is a hard question. Most people would simply use a calculator and make it very easy. </p>
<p>—So we have a question that depend on what your teacher taught you on the subject (if they taught you at all), an easy question that have a “creative” answer and a logical one, and a difficult math problem made easy by use of calculators. </p>
<p>If we think about a core issue, techology, that would bring a different perspective. People from the '10s, '20s, '30s would have very little clue how to turn on a TV with the remote. They might not even think it a TV remote if you put them in a modern envirnoment. The number will be foreign to them. But if you were to take someone who’s like 13 from those time period, they might be able to figure it out because they haven’t had all the experiences their parents or other adults had. This is what happening now with smartphone and tablets. People in their teens, 20s, 30s and 40s know exactly how to work it with more slower results as you get past 30. Past 50, you will notice that many people will have a problem with newer things and they are very slow to adapt OR don’t adapt at all. </p>
<p>If our IQ are dropping, it could be the simple results of increasing population and failing education all the while we become caught in the ever increasing rate of technology. If we don’t adapt to these soon, we are going to have a lot of problem soon. I do believe that people are getting dumber but I believe that is a result of mis-education (if that is even a word) and the lack of using technology to expand our knowledge.</p>
<p>And what if we asked those children about DNA? Evolution? Computers? They obviously wouldn’t know. Would that make them stupid? No, it would reflect the time that they live in. </p>
<p>So no.</p>
<p>Don’t lower reaction times correlate with the decline of manual labor in post industrial nations?</p>
<p>Weren’t people playing video games found to have higher reaction time or something?
I imagine after a year playing Call of Duty or Infamous or even some Lego games you will most likely react faster to some things like a person approaching or a simple handshake.</p>
<p>My younger D, an A student would have a terrible time with that test. Not because the material is difficult but because of the arithmatic she would have to do. She always had trouble on her math tests because of silly arithmatic errors. Higher level math no problem. She could use her calculator.</p>
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<p>But then, those 8th graders in 1912 would be pretty clueless about how many songs you can store on a 32 gig iPod nano, so I guess we’re about even.</p>
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<p>Quite honestly only a few even know unless they google it.</p>
<p>I don’t think they were smarter, I just think they were way better educated. The literature they were reading was considerably more difficult than Harry Potter or the Twilight books. Give a kid Edgar Allan Poe & see if they can read it. The public education system has dumbed down today’s kids to absurd levels. My wife is Indonesian & is surprised how bad American children are at mathematics & how terrible their composition is in English, especially considering they are native English speakers.</p>
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<p>The literature SOME were reading. Don’t kid yourself that the average person bound, as JHS said, for the respectable middle-class clerking job was reading Poe or Shakespeare or whoever. Plenty of little match girls, orphans, and young kids in factories and coal mines in those days.</p>
<p>To keep things in context… [National</a> Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) - 120 Years of Literacy](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp]National”>National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) - 120 Years of Literacy)</p>
<p>So yes, if you were an upper-middle to upper class white male, you might’ve been better educated (not smarter, but better educated) in 1913 than the average student (regardless of race, gender, or SES) is today.</p>
<p>As a mixed-race, female student from a poor family- I will definitely take our system today over what we had in 1913. If I had been born 100 years ago, there is no way I’d still be in school. Would I have been any less intelligent? No.</p>
<p>Maybe, but did they have the discipline to sit on a couch and watch a box for 7 and a half hours a day?</p>
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<p>Are you kidding? It looks very hard to me. Too hard. Nobody is considering the
“8th grade test” from 1912 in Kentucky might be a hoax? That is typically my first thought when I see something on the internet. Unlike some folks, whose first thought is “let me share this with the world on my facebook page” 
my first thought is usually… "hmmmmmmm… " I only believe half of what I see and none of what I hear.</p>
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<p>Being fresh out of high school, I can tell you that this is not the case everywhere.
-My school didn’t even try to put book like Harry Potter or Twilight on the class book list. They were optional to read. And only FEW people read them. And if a student can read through that many pages in Harry potter in a short amount of time, they can handle their reading lol.
-A “kid” is a vague description. An barely above average student should be able to read Poe’s with no problem.
-stories like Shakespeare or Dante’s Inferno are harder to understand in context. Meanwhile the Adventures of Huck Finn and The Great Gatbsy are easy reads. </p>
<p>I think it depend on the how the school teach these thing. Face it, many students don’t want to Math or English because it’s too hard or too boring.
I started hating on English because there was too many reading and analyzing and writing. Like I just want to read the book and find the hidden messages for myself not breaking it down and explaining “the function” of every page in a book.
Math I didn’t hate but love because it came easy for me. Other people just have a hard time.
So really I think they need to rethink the ways we teach the two most hated subjects.</p>
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That’s what I thought at first then as I typed through one of my previous post I realize how simple most of them are except math. Math is my best subject and those problems are foreign to me.</p>
<p>The test does not look that hard from the point of view of someone who graduated from high school decades ago, but some of the material (most of it except the math problems other than #8) probably would be considered high school level, not junior high school level, today.</p>
<p>However, as others have pointed out, those students in 1912 who made it to 8th grade were probably the top students from high SES families. According to <a href=“http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-22.pdf[/url]”>http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-22.pdf</a> , only 13.5% of people in 1910 had 4 years of high school, rising to 24.5% in 1940. In 1910, 23.8% had less than 5 years of elementary school, falling to 13.7% in 1940.</p>
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<p>While problem #8 requires a concept from high school geometry, it does not seem that the math section otherwise requires math skills not taught in K-8 (non-accelerated). However, could it be considered difficult because many of the problems are “word problems” requiring the student to have the skill of converting them into math problems?</p>
<p>I remember there was a test found from the late 1800s for grade school teachers that they had to pass in order to teach. [snopes.com:</a> 1895 Exam](<a href=“http://snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp]snopes.com:”>1895 Exam | Snopes.com)</p>
<p>It was very tough and of course people said this meant there were much stricter standards for education back then. Of course a quote was later found from one of the exam’s creators where he said out of 30-35 words that were given no one spelled more than 10 correctly.</p>