How a 1934 New York Graduation Exam Shows How Far Academic Standards Have Fallen | Intellectual Takeout"Today’s education system has a myriad of advantages that earlier generations never would have dreamed about.
Smartboards.
Tablets.
Advanced science labs.
Massive libraries.
These perks are wonderful and suggest that our schools are giving children a much better education than they would have had at an earlier time.
But what if all these advancements are just smoke and mirrors?
Is it possible that the parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents of today’s students had a better education?
...Such was the case when I came across a collection of Regents Exams – the exams required to graduate from high school in New York – in the New York State Library.
The archives provide a variety of exam subjects and range in date from the 1930s to the present. Curious, I pulled up one of the oldest, a 1934 American history exam, and did some quick, first page comparisons with the one given in 2017.
The most obvious difference was the question answer format.
The contemporary version was full of questions like the following, requiring a simple multiple-choice selection:
Aside from a brief matching section, however, the 1934 exam relies on essay questions like the following:
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