Harvard’s 1869 Entrance Exam: Could You Answer Tough Questions About Latin, Greek, Ancient History, Plane Geometry & More

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:

Har­vard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Cours­es: Explore Cours­es on Jus­tice, Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment, Lit­er­a­ture, Reli­gion, Comp­Sci & More

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

Teacher Calls Jacques Derrida’s Col­lege Admis­sion Essay on Shake­speare “Quite Incom­pre­hen­si­ble” (1951)

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.