Follow-Up to 8th Grade Exams

As promised, I followed up on my previous post on 8th Grade Exams. I wrote to the Salina Journal concerning the story and received the following in reply…

— Begin Email —
Yes, we published the story, and yes, the test is real. The original story ran in the mid-90s. It got a lot of attention when we first ran it, especially when Rush Limbaugh picked it up.

I believe that at one time the Urban Legend Web site had the test as a fake, but only because they library didn’t have the original copy in hand. However, I’m sending you the last story we did on the test. We thought it was real when we first ran the story, and we still think it’s real.
And the story lives on: This is the second request today – some 10 years later – for information that I’m responding to.

Hope this helps.
Thanks,
Ben
— End Email —

News – Page A01
June 1, 2003

Put to The Test
Handwritten notes lend credibility to test
David Clouston
Salina Journal

1895 Saline County eighth-grade graduation examination has been

Photos by TOM DORSEY / Salina Journal

The grandchildren of former Saline County school superintendent J.W. Armstrong found handwritten copies of the grammar questions from the 1895 eighth-grade graduation exam in papers their parents had kept.

The proof is there — the neat penmanship filling line after line on two yellowed sheets of tablet paper. Seeing the handwriting, Mary Laas thinks fondly of the memories from girlhood of her grandfather, J.W. Armstrong.

A pan of apples usually would sit on the dining room table at her grandparents’ — not unlike apples students would bring for their teachers, and Armstrong had been a teacher. He also at one time had been the county’s school superintendent. Armstrong also had farmed and hunted buffalo with the likes of Buffalo Bill Cody.

“He’d tell us stories. That’s why I think I’m so interested in history,” Laas said.

The two yellowed sheets of tablet paper were discovered in a box of her grandfather’s papers this spring by Laas’ younger brother, Joe Armstrong. Laas believes they put to rest one of the most tantalizing mysteries surrounding her grandfather — that an eighth-grade graduation test administered in 1895 is indeed real, not a hoax.

“It was in the folks’ stuff, and when we divided it up, he (Joe) took it home and put it up in his closet,” Laas said. “I would like to find the answers. But we’ve gone through this stuff, and the answers weren’t in with that.”

An entry from Superintendent J.W. Armstrong’s journal, found by historian Judy Lilly in the Saline County Register of Deeds Office, shows he gave the exam on April 13, 1895.
Saline County students in 1895 were required to pass the test to graduate from eighth grade. The test first surfaced publicly when it was published on the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society’s Web page in 1996.

After some of the test questions were published in the Salina Journal, the test gained national notoriety when it was mentioned by Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio and other media. Most stories and columns centered on the difficulty of the questions such young students were expected to know.

A typeset copy of the 1895 exam was re-discovered almost a century later by a local historian, Helen Crawford, who was working on a book about early school records from Saline County.

The publicity about the test has stirred up controversy over the tests’ authenticity by some critics. But this spring, Joe Armstrong and his sister, Laas, discovered the hand-written draft of the grammar part of the test, piled with some of their grandfather’s papers that their parents had kept.

Graduate numbers low

Locating the rough draft of the test also dovetails with more research into the test conducted by Salina historian Judy Lilly of the Salina Public Library.

Judy Lilly, Kansas librarian at the Salina Public Library, has found school records that show only seven eighth-graders graduated in 1895, the year of the difficult test, whereas there were about 28 graduates the year before and the year after.

Lilly located county school records filed in the Saline County Register of Deeds Office showing that the year of the test there were only seven graduates. Yet the year before, and the year after, there were about 28 graduates.

“I’m thinking that the test must have changed from year to year. It appears there were so few that passed that year that perhaps the previous year or the year after, the test wasn’t quite so hard,” she said.

The typeset copy of the test reads “Examination Graduation Questions of Saline County, Kansas. April 13, 1895.” The test was administered to students at Salina, New Cambria, Gypsum, Assaria, Falun, Bavaria and Glendale Township.

The test covered six sections: grammar, orthography, arithmetic, geography, U.S. history and physiology. Lilly also was able to locate in the register of deeds office a journal kept by Armstrong, for that school year.

“He would make an annotation, almost daily, that he was working on the exam test,” Lilly said.

Mary Laas, granddaughter of J.W. Armstrong, has a copy of the grammar questions.
A family photograph Laas has of Armstrong shows a dark-haired man with weathered hands with his wife and three sons. He was born in October 1854 in Tuscaraus County, Ohio, and came to Kansas in 1867, settling on a farm homesteaded by his brother four miles west of Salina. He died Sept. 2, 1939, a retired farmer at Hedville. Her grandfather was teaching school when he met her grandmother, Laas said.

One critic persuaded

An original critic of the authenticity of the eighth-grade exam has changed his opinion partially because of Lilly’s research. Gilroy, Calif., newspaper columnist Doug Meier first wrote on the Internet about his skepticism of the test in April 2002.

“I do believe now the exam was really administered to eighth-graders,” Meier said. “The most interesting thing about that test is how many people failed it.

“I think maybe this guy was a little overzealous, that he was trying to bring credibility to educators and education in Kansas. But, in any case, I’m pretty convinced that this thing is real.”

* Reporter David Clouston can be reached at 823-6464, Ext. 131, or by e-mail at sjdclouston @saljournal.com.

There you have it! Snopes.com is, at least partially, wrong on this one.
Omar, out!

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