While I won't dispute that modern education is ruining lots of kids' mental potential, a lot of the stumbling blocks with that old exam are just obsolete conventions.
Like 13 year old me would have found the arithmetic section pretty reasonable, if only I knew what the hell the length of a rod was and the volume of a bushel. And I could have listed many different types of punctuation, but I couldn't have told you what the "principle marks" were because AFAIK that's a defunct definition.
That said the orthography section would have destroyed 13 year old me, don't think I'd been taught any of that at that point. And the amount of specific location details memorized for geography is impressive too.
Also I believe the expected percentage of correct answers was much lower back then, because they hadn't given up on challenging gifted kids in favour of coddling retards yet. No-one was supposed to 100% the test, and most were probably expected to score 50% or less.
While I won't dispute that modern education is ruining lots of kids' mental potential, a lot of the stumbling blocks with that old exam are just obsolete conventions.
Like 13 year old me would have found the arithmetic section pretty reasonable, if only I knew what the hell the length of a rod was and the volume of a bushel. And I could have listed many different types of punctuation, but I couldn't have told you what the "principle marks" were because AFAIK that's a defunct definition.
That said the orthography section would have destroyed 13 year old me, don't think I'd been taught any of that at that point. And the amount of specific location details memorized for geography is impressive too.
Also I believe the expected percentage of correct answers was much lower back then, because they hadn't given up on challenging gifted kids in favour of coddling retards yet. No-one was supposed to 100% the test, and most were probably expected to score 50% or less.