“Decline I” is an instruction for the student to provide the first person pronoun in all cases: I (nominative), me (accusative/dative/ablative), my (genitive), mine (genitive substantive). (I have borrowed the case names from Latin, with which I am more familiar. I think the English cases are nominative, objective, possessive.)
I believe the misspellings in the spelling section are intentional so that the student will identify them—I am guessing that’s the point.
Thank you for finding the truth. Books from that era would likely have been subjected to far more careful proofreading, which explains the typo density (or lack thereof) compared to this.
> Note that there are several typesetting mistakes on the test including a mistake in the spelling list. The word "eneeavor" should be "endeavor." This version of the exam was probably a master version given out to the schools (note that the spelling words wouldn’t be written on a test.) The museum has been told that the exam was handed out in a scroll form (that is why the paper is long.) The typos would have been corrected simply by contacting the teachers and telling them to mark their copies accordingly, much like would be done today. And there might not be quite as many typos as you think; "Serbia" for example was indeed spelled "Servia" back then.
It's true that LLMs are very good at reproducing correctly spelled text - but we're looking at an image here, and image-generating AIs aren't so good at generating text in most cases. They've gotten a lot better recently, but they're still not quite there yet.
(To be clear, I don't believe this is actually generated by AI, but in this case, but since we're looking at an image, I can see why some people might be concerned that it might be AI given the misspellings.)
I don’t have stats but in that period of time, but I imagine a lot of “less serious” students were dropping out by 8th grade to work in unskilled labor.
I wonder to what extent the questions on this test indicate deep knowledge of the many subjects covered, vs. just following precisely those facts taught in the year's curriculum. Clearly students were expected to memorize a lot of different things by rote, but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't much beyond what's covered by these questions.
What was a passing grade back then? Even today this varies a lot in different systems. In the US public school system, 70% is considered passing, but in other contexts tests are constructed so that e.g. 35% correct is a passing grade.
GenX here. 70% was minimum acceptable grade when I was in US public school and when I was in College. You could technically pass a class in public school with 60% (D-). However you needed a C GPA to graduate high school in my day.
In college anything below a C put you on academic probation. In graduate school anything lower than a B put you on academic probation.
At university there were classes where anything less than 80% was considered a fail and there were other classes where anything more than 35% was considered astonishingly good. It really depends on the lecturer and their style.
For my college math and physics exams, the profs would pick exercises at random and wouldnt know how hard the test was until after the grades came in. And having a super high ceiling where a 25% is passing allowed them to see if there were any super geniuses in the class
Exactly. It seems like so many people fall into the logical trap that school is about getting you to permanently memorize facts that, in a typical adult life, end up being largely trivia.
School is about teaching your brain how to retain information in general, so you can retain what you need to use.
The Balkans of 112 years ago did not look like the Balkans of today (for starters, Serbia no longer borders Turkey), and countries' spelling changes over time. For example, Turkey now desires that English-speaking people use Türkiye instead.
But maybe it's too much to ask of modern Americans to understand that spellings of proper nouns can and do change over time.
> While it might be easy to romanticize the rigor of early 20th-century education based on this exam, it's important to recognize that the educational system of 1912 served a very different purpose compared to today’s system. The 1912 exam prioritized foundational, concrete knowledge, preparing students for the immediate demands of adult life in a largely localized, labor-intensive world. In contrast, the 2024 education system aims to equip students with the skills needed for a global, ever-changing job market, emphasizing critical thinking, creativity, and technological literacy.
I'd much prefer my children to have concrete knowledge and prepared for the world. Frankly, they'll be plenty prepared for the job market. Many of the folks I work are barely able to function outside of their role at work -- order all their food, can't change a tire, outsource all knowledge, etc. They're probably like the aristocrats in the 17th - 19th centuries, where they know only what they need, servants take care of the rest.
To be honest, this is already a very charitable interpretation of the 1912 exam in the first place. If you strip out the questions of the arithmetic section, the remaining questions don't look like a test of "foundational, concrete knowledge" but rather a test of trivia the school board expects you to know. The grammar questions don't ask you how the English language works, they ask you how to mechanically parse a high register subset of the English language (i.e., avoiding colloquialisms) in a very particular jargon. The history section is even worse, treating wars as sequences of Important Battles™ and otherwise seeming to suggest a Great Man view of history.
This is an 8th grade exam from 1912 from Bullitt County in Kentucky for White students.
It's not representative of the average American during that era - who would not have made it to 8th grade.
Heck, in 1910, Kentucky had a 17% illiteracy rate [0]
The fact that illiteracy using the IMF definition is non-existent in the US automatically means your average 8th grader today is better off than one a century ago.
And if I'm honest, the exam itself doesn't seem that different from content I dealt with in 4th-6th grade and I was attending an urban lower middle class school back then.
Practically all American adults are "literate" in the sense that they can recognise and write some words, but about 14% can't really read in any useful sense - they can usually understand a warning sign or recognise a brand name, but they couldn't reliably understand a one-paragraph newspaper article or find a program in a TV listing.
That’s shockingly high.
As somebody that has been literate for decades, I can’t even fathom how you would survive. Or if that’s taken care of, how would you entertain yourself?
I'd steer clear from comparing countries based on Functional Illiteracy because the US is the only country that officially uses that definition and consistently collects data about this - which is good, because it is a forcing function for us to worker harder at solving functional illiteracy as well.
That said, Germany's functional illiteracy rate is estimated to be comparable to the US [0]
It's a similar story with PISA as well - most other countries use it as a dick measuring contest by testing at gifted schools, but the NCES tries to randomize PISA testing in order to actually benchmark subnational performance and identify laggards.
This all being said - I would expect an 8th grader of 2024 to pass the 1912 test. Look at the questions, they are nothing untoward, not rocket science.
Yeah, but the vast majority wouldn't, so isn't this contradictory? Is he trying to say 8th graders could pass if they studied or had the identical question in advance? That, too, I am skeptical of. Maybe some could, but most would not.
The reason is because the corpus of knowledge is so large. It's not like those are the only questions, but rather drawn from much larger reading. This is why even well-educated adults do poorly on general knowledge tests--what is considered 'general knowledge' is quite vast.
The difference now vs. 1912:
Emphasis on specialization for gifted kids, but also considerable intra-classroom variability of skill, so you have some kids learning multi-variable calc at 9th grade (not at school, but rather at local college, private tutoring , or self-study such as online with apps), and on the other extreme, others still struggling with fractions.
In 1912, the strugglers would have been weeded out by either dropping out of school or learning a trade. Mandatory k-12 school was not yet a thing. So there are selection biases here. Same for demographic change.
The only reason a modern 8th grader wouldn't pass is that most of these questions are about regurgitating memorized snippets of data, which has been out of style for quite a while. The math portion is a few grades less advanced than what I was learning in 8th grade a few decades ago.
"eneeavor" "kalsomining" "dodr" "Decline I."
Is this AI-generated? It certainly has all the signs of being so.
I've read real books from the late 19th and early 20th century, and while occasional typos do appear, their density here is suspicious.
Thus my conclusion is that I don't think this is a real 8th grade test.
“Decline I” is an instruction for the student to provide the first person pronoun in all cases: I (nominative), me (accusative/dative/ablative), my (genitive), mine (genitive substantive). (I have borrowed the case names from Latin, with which I am more familiar. I think the English cases are nominative, objective, possessive.)
I believe the misspellings in the spelling section are intentional so that the student will identify them—I am guessing that’s the point.
"eneeavor" is I think the only misspelling in the spelling section, so I don't think it is intentional. Perhaps the test was read aloud.
Real or fake, it's not AI generated. It's been around for over a decade (this same one, with those typos).
https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191... - on the answers page they also acknowledge the typo on "eneeavor".
https://headsup.scoutlife.org/would-you-pass-this-test/ - 2013
Thank you for finding the truth. Books from that era would likely have been subjected to far more careful proofreading, which explains the typo density (or lack thereof) compared to this.
"Kalsomining" is the -ing form of "kalsomine", ie. whitewash.
"Decline I" is a request to decline the pronoun "I".
I'll accept these as being legitimate, but that doesn't explain "dodr" nor "eneeavor".
Edit: there's also "secrate" and "Pres dent"
They do appear to be simple typos.
edit: The test seems to come from this page from the county's museum: https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191.... The WayBack machine records the first snapshot in 2012, so AI seems unlikely.
They note the spelling errors
> Note that there are several typesetting mistakes on the test including a mistake in the spelling list. The word "eneeavor" should be "endeavor." This version of the exam was probably a master version given out to the schools (note that the spelling words wouldn’t be written on a test.) The museum has been told that the exam was handed out in a scroll form (that is why the paper is long.) The typos would have been corrected simply by contacting the teachers and telling them to mark their copies accordingly, much like would be done today. And there might not be quite as many typos as you think; "Serbia" for example was indeed spelled "Servia" back then.
>Is this AI-generated? It certainly has all the signs of being so.
Current generation LLMs does not make smelling mistakes, only humans do.
I think that the person was talking about image generation models.
Even the best of existing image generation models often spell words hilariously wrong when asked to generate an image containing text.
At least in Finnish I’ve seen some, not often but they are there.
What is "Decline I" a typo of? I interpret is as a request to decline (that is, give the inflected forms of) the pronoun "I".
I've never seen an LLM typo a word in normal usage. Who knows if it's fake, but I highly doubt it's AI-generated.
It's true that LLMs are very good at reproducing correctly spelled text - but we're looking at an image here, and image-generating AIs aren't so good at generating text in most cases. They've gotten a lot better recently, but they're still not quite there yet.
(To be clear, I don't believe this is actually generated by AI, but in this case, but since we're looking at an image, I can see why some people might be concerned that it might be AI given the misspellings.)
If it were a generated image there would be giveaway malformed/deformed letters, but these letterforms are immaculate.
But yes in general it's a reasonable concern to have.
Generative AI tends to produce this sort of output.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/fcell...
I don’t have stats but in that period of time, but I imagine a lot of “less serious” students were dropping out by 8th grade to work in unskilled labor.
According to the top comment, only about 10% of students attended high school at the time.
10% of primary school students went on to high school?
10% of high school aged people attended a high school?
90% of students enrolled in high school never bothered to attend or "worked from home"?
yes this is the obvious confounder. They make it almost impossible to fail or drop out of school
I wonder to what extent the questions on this test indicate deep knowledge of the many subjects covered, vs. just following precisely those facts taught in the year's curriculum. Clearly students were expected to memorize a lot of different things by rote, but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't much beyond what's covered by these questions.
I would have failed the test. It frightens me that an 8th grader would be better educated than me today.
That’s not education. Most of it is simple memorization.
Understanding biology or that nouns decline is not "simple memorization."
What was a passing grade back then? Even today this varies a lot in different systems. In the US public school system, 70% is considered passing, but in other contexts tests are constructed so that e.g. 35% correct is a passing grade.
GenX here. 70% was minimum acceptable grade when I was in US public school and when I was in College. You could technically pass a class in public school with 60% (D-). However you needed a C GPA to graduate high school in my day.
In college anything below a C put you on academic probation. In graduate school anything lower than a B put you on academic probation.
At university there were classes where anything less than 80% was considered a fail and there were other classes where anything more than 35% was considered astonishingly good. It really depends on the lecturer and their style.
For my college math and physics exams, the profs would pick exercises at random and wouldnt know how hard the test was until after the grades came in. And having a super high ceiling where a 25% is passing allowed them to see if there were any super geniuses in the class
8th-grade me would probably score better than today-me.
Exactly. It seems like so many people fall into the logical trap that school is about getting you to permanently memorize facts that, in a typical adult life, end up being largely trivia.
School is about teaching your brain how to retain information in general, so you can retain what you need to use.
My brain is pudding. Also, 8th-grade me learned stuff that wasn't even known in 1912. What needs to be learned changes over time.
I think it's more of a filtering mechanism for people who are smart but also obedient. these people are economically valuable
Not a chance
I can't even read it on my small phone screen and I'll be d*mned if I have to zoom in
The teachers misspelled Serbia and Romania, but expect little American kids to know where these are.
Those appear to be the historically correct spellings:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Roumania
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Servia
The Balkans of 112 years ago did not look like the Balkans of today (for starters, Serbia no longer borders Turkey), and countries' spelling changes over time. For example, Turkey now desires that English-speaking people use Türkiye instead.
But maybe it's too much to ask of modern Americans to understand that spellings of proper nouns can and do change over time.
They were in sorta different places then . . .
Remember that big hot war in the 90s?
And there was that thing in the 40s, too . . .
> Remember that big hot war in the 90s?
Ah, when the Servians shot down the invisible airplane, because they didn't see it. I remember :-)
> While it might be easy to romanticize the rigor of early 20th-century education based on this exam, it's important to recognize that the educational system of 1912 served a very different purpose compared to today’s system. The 1912 exam prioritized foundational, concrete knowledge, preparing students for the immediate demands of adult life in a largely localized, labor-intensive world. In contrast, the 2024 education system aims to equip students with the skills needed for a global, ever-changing job market, emphasizing critical thinking, creativity, and technological literacy.
I'd much prefer my children to have concrete knowledge and prepared for the world. Frankly, they'll be plenty prepared for the job market. Many of the folks I work are barely able to function outside of their role at work -- order all their food, can't change a tire, outsource all knowledge, etc. They're probably like the aristocrats in the 17th - 19th centuries, where they know only what they need, servants take care of the rest.
To be honest, this is already a very charitable interpretation of the 1912 exam in the first place. If you strip out the questions of the arithmetic section, the remaining questions don't look like a test of "foundational, concrete knowledge" but rather a test of trivia the school board expects you to know. The grammar questions don't ask you how the English language works, they ask you how to mechanically parse a high register subset of the English language (i.e., avoiding colloquialisms) in a very particular jargon. The history section is even worse, treating wars as sequences of Important Battles™ and otherwise seeming to suggest a Great Man view of history.
This is an 8th grade exam from 1912 from Bullitt County in Kentucky for White students.
It's not representative of the average American during that era - who would not have made it to 8th grade.
Heck, in 1910, Kentucky had a 17% illiteracy rate [0]
The fact that illiteracy using the IMF definition is non-existent in the US automatically means your average 8th grader today is better off than one a century ago.
And if I'm honest, the exam itself doesn't seem that different from content I dealt with in 4th-6th grade and I was attending an urban lower middle class school back then.
[0] - https://usa.ipums.org/usa/resources/voliii/pubdocs/1910/Vol1...
Practically all American adults are "literate" in the sense that they can recognise and write some words, but about 14% can't really read in any useful sense - they can usually understand a warning sign or recognise a brand name, but they couldn't reliably understand a one-paragraph newspaper article or find a program in a TV listing.
https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009481.pdf
That’s shockingly high. As somebody that has been literate for decades, I can’t even fathom how you would survive. Or if that’s taken care of, how would you entertain yourself?
I'd steer clear from comparing countries based on Functional Illiteracy because the US is the only country that officially uses that definition and consistently collects data about this - which is good, because it is a forcing function for us to worker harder at solving functional illiteracy as well.
That said, Germany's functional illiteracy rate is estimated to be comparable to the US [0]
It's a similar story with PISA as well - most other countries use it as a dick measuring contest by testing at gifted schools, but the NCES tries to randomize PISA testing in order to actually benchmark subnational performance and identify laggards.
[0] - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-31821-001
I would also prefer your children were uneducated.
This all being said - I would expect an 8th grader of 2024 to pass the 1912 test. Look at the questions, they are nothing untoward, not rocket science.
Yeah, but the vast majority wouldn't, so isn't this contradictory? Is he trying to say 8th graders could pass if they studied or had the identical question in advance? That, too, I am skeptical of. Maybe some could, but most would not.
The reason is because the corpus of knowledge is so large. It's not like those are the only questions, but rather drawn from much larger reading. This is why even well-educated adults do poorly on general knowledge tests--what is considered 'general knowledge' is quite vast.
The difference now vs. 1912:
Emphasis on specialization for gifted kids, but also considerable intra-classroom variability of skill, so you have some kids learning multi-variable calc at 9th grade (not at school, but rather at local college, private tutoring , or self-study such as online with apps), and on the other extreme, others still struggling with fractions.
In 1912, the strugglers would have been weeded out by either dropping out of school or learning a trade. Mandatory k-12 school was not yet a thing. So there are selection biases here. Same for demographic change.
The only reason a modern 8th grader wouldn't pass is that most of these questions are about regurgitating memorized snippets of data, which has been out of style for quite a while. The math portion is a few grades less advanced than what I was learning in 8th grade a few decades ago.