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Getting In | THINK ADMISSIONS REQUIREMENTS ARE HARD TODAY? TRY IT IN GREEK.

IN THE YEARS BEFORE COMPUTERIZED SAT prep and $30,000 tuitions, your ticket to Cornell could be punched for $10 a trimester and a willingness to work on the University farm a few hours a day--assuming you were of the appropriate gender, of course. "At the onset, almost any fifteen-year-old male of good moral character could get into Cornell," Morris Bishop '14, PhD '26, states in his History of Cornell. Many early landgrant schools had no entrance requirements at all, and Ezra Cornell, in the spirit of his motto, often pressured faculty to admit students who couldn't pass the entrance examination, which was comparable to those at other American universities. Sixty failed the first exam, held in the Cornell Library basement on October 6, 1898. Nevertheless, not everyone was impressed with its rigor. "One can get into Cornell about as easily as the Chicago High School," sniffed one critic in 1872. "The examinations are much the same."

Admissions officers were soon under pressure to stiffen requirements. In a flier distributed to the entering class in 1870, a Board of Trustees resolution warned would-be slackers that "Cornell is not a charity school"--all students must have "knowledge of English branches and equations to the second degree of algebra." Those who intended to pursue the socalled "Course in Arts" added geometry, plus Greek and Latin, with questions drawn from Cicero's orations and "the whole of Caesar's ‘Commentaries on the Gallic War.'"

To modern eyes, these circa-1870 entrance tests--examples of which were published annually in the Cornell Register, the handbook distributed to potential students --are a bewilderment of pedagogical anachronisms and geographical arcana. The English grammar section includes long passages of tricky dictation to test one's spelling and penmanship, along with paralyzingly vague essay questions ("What is English grammar?" "Write your views on the question, ‘What is the best vocation?' "). The geography exam, reflecting the nineteenth-century importance of shipping, seems peculiarly fixated on bodies of water: students were expected to reel off long lists of waterways on various continents, explain the puzzling "Why are there so few rivers in Africa?", and provide detailed navigational directions for voyages one would be unlikely to undertake today ("How could one go by water from Montevideo to Pittsburgh?").

It's difficult to imagine a rawboned 1868 farmboy being able to translate Xenophon or pull out bits of ancient history that might give a classics professor pause (quick--what part did the Allobroges play in the Catilinarian conspiracy?). With their emphasis on rote memorization, dead languages, and the sort of state capitals mastery that makes "Jeopardy" champions, the exams reveal a bygone sort of scholarship, one that may make the standardized-test-takers of today grateful for their comparatively straightforward multiple-choice analogies and reading comprehension questions.

Unless, of course, you'd rather deal with this mind-bender from 1871: "In going from Suez coastwise and keeping the land on your left till you come to Behring's Straits, what countries do you pass?"

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