Are the kids supposed to know the exact weight per bushel of each product that might be sold by the bushel?
You've obviously never bought or sold grain. It is done by weight. How is that possible? Because a certain moisture content is supposed and that equates to an exact weight.
If you sell grain today they measure the moisture content and dock the price per bushel if it is too wet.
They most certainly would know the weightof a bushel of wheat. Common knowledge at the time.
This is just one example of many weak attempts to debunk the test.
I didn't know what exactly a bushel was when I saw the test, so I googled it. The first link was the Wikipedia entry which told me clearly, near the top of the page, that a bushel of wheat weighs 60 lbs, using standard commodity trading measures. (Although it is a unit of volume, bushels of commodities are regularly treated as units of weight with set conditions for each commodity, e.g. 13.5% moisture by weight for wheat.) It took me less than 2 minutes to find this information, which let me answer the question. This question is a simple word problem, not out of line for today's 8th graders, provided only that they know or are given a conversion factor for wheat. For the children of farmers, it's neither shocking nor difficult.
The amazing thing is how wedded some commenters are to the idea of ignorance, not just their own ignorance but that of others. Consider that IYAS9YAS couldn't solve this simple word problem with access to google, so he assumed others were incompetent. I don't believe IYAS9YAS is truly that ignorant, given proper motivation. Rather he has an emotional issue that has a practical result of leaving him willfully ignorant and needing to believe others are as well.
Other attempts to debunk the test are just as weak, and, as with the attempt to debunk the bushel question, tell more about the would be debunkers than about 8th graders in 1895 Kansas. Note that the most cited link "debunking" the test clearly states that there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the test. The "debunking" site merely claims the clearly existing test, clearly published in 1895, and clearly stated as a graduation test, might really be something else, like a test for teachers. The entire evidence given for this is the word "applicant" in the newspaper article, which might possibly not mean applicant for a diploma. Honestly, the argument is childish.
Note that the pendulum has swung back towards academics since I was a child, at least for early grade levels. My grandson is in kindergarten, where he reads (simple) books to me and writes in complete sentences. This is the norm for his class of 20 students in a public school in a state where kindergarten is mandatory. When I was in kindergarten, we only learned our ABC's. At the current learning rate, my grandson will be past the level shown on that 1895 test by 8th grade.
That test isn't so amazing. What's amazing is the period of ignorance and incompetence in public schools that became accepted in the late 20th century US. Hopefully, that period is just an interlude that will end soon.