In 2025, Harvard once again began asking applicants to submit an SAT or ACT score. This was a reversal of the no-test-necessary policy that it and quite a few other American colleges and universities adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic. To some observers of higher education, the disappearance of the standardized-test requirement came as a shock, though in a sense, it wasn’t without precedent. Until the mid-nineteen-tens, Harvard had applicants take its own entrance exam, since no standardized test existed. One example from 1869, which you can see here, evaluated students on their proficiency in Latin, Greek, history and geography, arithmetic, algebra, and plane geometry.
The idea wasn’t so much to evaluate the test-taker’s reasoning abilities as to make sure he’d already undergone the expected education for his class. Even so, as the New York Times’ Alison Leigh Cowan notes, “colleges occasionally allowed prospects to correct deficiencies as a condition of admission.”
This reflects the very different role higher education played in American life a century and a half ago than it does today: back then, Harvard admitted 185 out of 210 applicants; last year, it admitted 1,968 out of 57,435. As the country industrialized, colleges and universities changed accordingly: existing ones grew, many new ones appeared, and a greater and greater percentage of students submitted to a process surrounding tertiary education that eventually came to seem machine-like itself.
To college-applying students today, the 1869 entrance exam may not look entirely unfamiliar, at least to the extent that it asks questions about mathematics. Chances are, however, that no current Harvard hopeful, no matter how intelligent, could actually pass the test, given the weight it places on classical languages. Throughout the nineteenth century and up until World War I, all young gentlemen got an education in Latin and ancient Greek. But when both started to vanish from college-admissions exams, especially after the SAT grew dominant in the nineteen-forties, so did the immediate incentive to learn them. Reflect though that does the exigencies of a rapidly changing technological society, it also makes one wonder how much someone with no grasp of Latin or Greek really understands English: a question to which the college students of recent decades provide dispiriting answers.
Related Content:
This Is What an 1869 MIT Entrance Exam Looks Like: Could You Have Passed the Test?
Can You Pass This Test Originally Given to 8th Graders Living in Kentucky in 1912?
W.H. Auden’s 1941 Syllabus Asked Students to Read 32 Great Literary Works, Totaling 6,000 Pages
Carl Sagan’s Syllabus & Final Exam for His Course on Critical Thinking (Cornell, 1986)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
