Could this be because Harvard is increasingly desirable & hard to get into? From this, the average standard of students + their dedication to their work/GPA may well have steadily grown too.
From a quick google, the acceptance rate to Harvard was 20% higher in the 70's. In 1940 it had an absolute acceptance rate of 85%.
I dont actually know the answer, but from that graph only, the rising rate could be as much from a higher standard of student as lowering standards of marking.
In the past a university education was 100% optional - as was high school for that matter, and so the only people pursuing such tended to be exceptional academic/intellectual outliers. The pool of people interested was very low, and standards were exceptionally high. For instance, this [1] is a Harvard entrance exam from 1869!
We don't routinely teach Classics in high school, so it's not surprising that those sections would be beyond most students today.
The sections on that exam dealing with Mathematics seem appropriate or possibly slightly on the easy side; I would expect an equivalent exam today to include at least a bit of calculus, but over the past 150 years there has been a shift in pedagogy towards calculus and away from geometry so it's probably just a sign of the times.
Well no. Being wealthy doesn't make you an academic outlier, and education used to be extremely affordable for anybody so interested in pursuing such. Consequently, many of the greatest minds of the past came from very humble beginnings.
For instance Harvard's first black graduate graduated in 1870 [1] (meaning he would have passed a test near to exactly like the one shared), and he was a remarkable man. He was left supporting his family as a teenager after his father ran away for the Gold Rush, and was unable to attend public school due to his skin color. Yet, he persevered and lived one amazing life far above and beyond becoming Harvard's first black grad. But people like him are far and few between - and those were the sort of people applying.
Those were a tiny minority of the people applying.
Nothing in that entrance exam requires an academic outlier. All it requires is a classical liberal arts education (Latin, Greek, classic literature, history, geography, geometry)
Most people who attended higher education could do so because wealthy children received such an education above and beyond what the poor received (and because the could also afford college thanks to that wealth).
In the early 19th century Harvard cost a total (everything from tuition to clothes, housing, vacations, and servant) of about $8,400 inflation adjusted. [1] And in times before we turned the money printer on, inflation was very stable - even occasionally dipping into deflation, so that's going to be quite close to what it would have cost in the late 19th century as well. And there was no opaque system for admission. If you passed that test, you were in. Well at least until the early 20th century when Harvard decided too many Jews (who were anything but elite/rich at the time) were being admitted, so they created a racial quota system. The only requirement was academic excellence.
And on that note of excellence, that test is going to completely destroy most of anybody, let alone high school grads. The breadth of knowledge demanded paired with the extensive depth of such is something very few are practically capable of obtaining without an absolutely obscene amount of effort. Keep in mind this wasn't some sort of a take home exam or whatever, these exams were done on the spot - in an 8 hour window.
Today's high school grads wouldn't do well because their education covers entirely different topics. They don't learn Latin and Ancient Greek, and history and geography don't focus almost entirely on Ancient Greece and Rome (unlike 7/9 of the questions on that section of the test).
The math section has some hard wanky arithmetic and by-hand computations using logarithms. Modern students would struggle because that hasn't been a focus of math education since the invention of the calculator. Your average physics professor would struggle with that because no one needs to do that stuff by hand any more. A modern Harvard applicant would ace that algebra section. The geometry section is 50/50 - there's still plenty of geometry in modern education but it no longer involves memorising Euclid.
On the other hand there's no calculus/analysis which is probably the biggest focus of higher-level high school math - something an applicant of that era would be flummoxed because it wasn't part of classical math education. There's also a complete dearth of any of the natural sciences which was again neglected in a classical education.
I'm telling you that that's not an intrinsically difficult exam, it just covers areas that were the focus of an upper class classical education of the time. You're confusing a different educational focus with intrinsic difficulty. If your math education up to the age of 18 was 90% long-form manual computations and memorising Euclid's Elements you'd ace that section too.
You can't just take what you know about modern education and retrofit it into the past. The system was just so ridiculously different. To start with the overwhelming majority of people, low and high class alike, had very limited formal education.
I tried to find a list of Harvard graduates of the era to demonstrate this, but the best I could come up with is this [1] list of Harvard presidents who all tended to be distinguished graduates themselves. It's quite unfortunate, because these are ostensibly the cream of the crop - which kind of plays into your class stuff, but I think even this sample also works to largely reject it. In any case it's quite interesting to read their bios!
For instance check out guys like Thomas Hill [2]. He had very minimal formal education, yet was a sponge for knowledge, and learned what was necessary to achieve - and achieve he did. Another is Jared Sparks [3]. Educated in common schools (which most certainly were not teaching Latin/Greek and other advanced topics) before he went to work at a variety of trades and then (presumably after saving up some money) attended a private school at the age 20+, before finally making his way to Harvard.
Basically it's not like you just went to school, graduated, and then applied with the knowledge you'd gained - at least not in general. In a world where education was optional, those who pursued it tended to do so out of passion and from that passion exceptional competence also tended to emerge.
Without knowing the academic context the paper is a bit meaningless. Incoming students were obviously expected to have studied Greek and Latin, for example. And I doubt mathematical education was the same; the focus of teaching would have been different because calculators only sort-of existed which would radically change how much rote work was taught and practised.
Fully support the observation that university meant something different in those days though, the standards were much higher. Although I'm not sure if that would apply at Harvard since their class sizes probably haven't changed by all that much.
One thing is certain. I’d not get into Harvard in 1869.
Initially I thought it was all a rich kids game, but the later maths and geometry questions require you to know what you are doing. Of course thats easier with expensive tutors, but it’s entirely possible you’ll never grasp it.
From a quick google, the acceptance rate to Harvard was 20% higher in the 70's. In 1940 it had an absolute acceptance rate of 85%.
I dont actually know the answer, but from that graph only, the rising rate could be as much from a higher standard of student as lowering standards of marking.