Comments on: The Greatest Archimedian Lever

By: Felix

Felix — Sat, 18 Jun 2016 01:52:47 +0000

The 1st question lost me with that little word, “most”. One would expect better of a standardized test. The answer was, as is usual with multiple choice tests made by individual teachers, easily guessable from context and logic. But, still.

Slightly wider view: The first few questions concern a quote from Ben Franklin. Now, Ben wrote a lot of things, many of which sound like they were cranked out by Ron Reagan’s team, but this quote about an itinerant gospel preacher was not of the usual. Too, I wonder whether the word, “wonderful” in the quote has precisely a modern meaning. :)

Wider view: It would seem the history of the US was the history of race, slavery, civil rights, immigration, immigration, and other developments related to causes currently adopted for the brand management of “progressive”.

This, while the (northern and western) US was arguably the country best fitted to the biggest thing that’s happened in the last 10,000 years – the industrial revolution.

That all said, I was impressed by the depth of some of the questions. Did we have such subtle, spear-fishing questions decades ago? Are these questions built to withstand students wielding secret search engines?

It might be interesting to build whole new civilizations with search-able histories just to experiment with how well people with no prior knowledge of the civilization could answer questions about that civilization with and without Google.

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 17:03:21 +0000

I took both the AP US and European History exams in 2006 and found the slant in the tests and their respective courses to be surprisingly minimal, leaving aside that my professor was a socialist who admired Mao.

I admit it’s possible they’ve gotten worse since then.

By: T. Greer

T. Greer — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 16:29:10 +0000

For my AP history exam I wrote about what Alexander de Tocueville saw in America that was distinctive from other countries, and how that was reflected in the documents they gave to me to analyze.

Got a 5.

It was not a “progressive” answer on my part.

By: Graham

Graham — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 14:12:34 +0000

I am reminded of Asimov's short story "Profession", which I still find chilling. I'm sure Asimov didn't intend it to be, but then he also thought the ghastly megacity of New York in "The Caves of Steel" was an ideal form of society.