Posted on 08/04/2009 6:57:59 AM PDT by Vigilanteman
On the morning drive Quinn & Rose radio show, I heard about the famous high school graduation exam from Salina, Kansas which Snopes had debunked as a hoax.
I remember when they did this as I checked their site which categorically stated that such an exam did not exist. Well, it turned out that such an exam does exist and is preserved by a historical society in, of all places (drum roll, please) . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at snopes.com ...
So naturally, I log on to see Snopes eat crow.
Only the first thing to catch my eye is a big red
I figure WTF? and scroll up to see that they've changed the question. It is no longer about the existence of the exam, not that it is a documented fact.
Snopes has rewritten the question as to what the exam is supposed to show. In Snopes view, the questions are a bunch of irrelevant, arcane facts not unlike memorizing the names of the key rivers in South America.
Certainly, some of the questions fall in that category, but more require actual broad-based knowledge and problem solving skills. Snopes also likes to dismiss the exam because some of those citing its existence stated that it was a high school entrance exam rather than a graduation exam.
Well, knock me over with a feather!
Several occasions I have searched Snopes for political stuff. I have found them to be incorrect several times, they have a liberal bias.
The exam is not for high school students, 8th grade students, etc.
It is an exam for graduating from a teacher’s school.
Of course, teachers today couldn’t pass that test, so it is still very telling.
Has anybody found a Google cache or Wayback Machine copy of Snopes from before changing the question?
Laura Ingalls Wilder passed the teaching exam at 14.
I realized Snopes was biased during the Swift Boat stuff.
While much was subject to debate, there were some objective truths that Snopes just took the DNC line on.
Check out the massive research department at Snopes:
http://www.postchronicle.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=128&num=215957
You might want to try http://truthorfiction.com - I don’t know how they compare, except that I’ve heard that “Truth Or Fiction” is more conservative.
And there's this piece about Hillary Clinton helping free two Black Panthers accused of torturing and murdering Alex Rackley. Snopes call it false. I contacted David Horowitz on his website just after this “debunking” and he still stands behind this story as true.
There is a very similar EIGHTH GRADE test, from North Dakota, in the back of a coffee-table book on North Dakota schoolhouses. I stood in Barnes and Noble in Fargo once, reading it. I couldn’t answer any of the questions, and I have three (worthless, I guess) degrees.
How did Snopes spin changing the name of the hospital that Barack Obama claims to have been born at?
Snopes is biased Left and held out hope for YEARS that Hillary wasn’t lying about being named after Sir Edmund Hillary. Their last dodge was that maybe her mother lied to her and she innocently repeated the claim.
Eventually a staffer spilled the beans.
They also carefully cast the synopsis statement (or included extraneous bogus details) to spin a “rumor” or email as false that really is true.
People think they are credible because they stole much of the descriptions on garden variety urban rumors from Jan Brunvand’s books on the subject. They are crapweasels.
They use FactCheck.org as a source.
But Snopes is on the internets, so it must be true....s>
This would not be the first time that Snopes conveniently ignores facts and spouts a liberal line. They join a long line of purveyors of slant.
Here is the link to the very real transcribed version of the exam:
Smoky Valley Genealogical Society
EXAMINATION GRADUATION QUESTIONS OF SALINE COUNTY, KANSAS
April 13, 1895 J.W. Armstrong, County Superintendent.
“The following document was transcribed from the original document in the collection of the Smoky Valley Genealogy Society, Salina, Kansas. This test is the original eighth-grade final exam for 1895 from Salina, KS. An interesting note is the fact that the county students taking this test were allowed to take the test in the 7th grade, and if they did not pass the test at that time, they were allowed to re-take it again in the 8th grade.”
As taken from the
http://skyways.lib.ks.us/genweb/saline/society/exam.html
The husband and wife team that run Snopes have been outed as Democrats long ago during the Clinton Admin.
IMHO, you have to take anything the post with a grain of salt because they will spin it to benefit the DNC or Democrats in general.
The only thing stopping me from finishing the math part in about 5 minutes was the fact that nobody I know knows what a rod is, how to get the size of an acre, what a bushel of wheat is, how to write a promissory note. In addition that language style is not really used anymore.
In 1895, and for many years after, graduating from eighth grade represented the extent of many students’ public school education.
The point was that students with an 8th grade education were prepared to function in society. They could communicate, correspond, calculate, and knew how to handle any income they generated.
All of these are useful measures in the country. A rod is the lengthy of on lane of traffic, so country roads are exactly 33 feet wide.
The acre can be calculated by squaring the number of feet in a mile (5280') and dividing by the number of acres in a section (640).
A bushel is about the size of a normal sized laundry basket and so-sized because it can be safely carried when filled by an average harvester. The weight, of course, will vary by content, even if it is the same product. But wheat is typically about 60 pounds to the bushel. The peck (1/4 of a bushel) was a convenience for farmer's markets (and still is) for customers who couldn't use a full bushel.
Our modern checks actually have their origin in the promissory notes which were sold in a small pad in stationery stores or even country banks back in the days when one's good name was their credit. Some areas had such a shortage of cash that promissory notes were actually passed around as a medium of exchange in some locales. The larger general stores in the town accepted them before checkwriting came common and knew the drawer would always be in to redeem them in the fall the day their harvest was sold to the grain elevator.
Some stores actually went further and gave the customer a "Storebook" which looked more or less like a bank passbook. The customers brought in the storebook to be updated with each transaction.
In my hometown, it was still common in the 1970's for small merchants who got non-sufficient funds (NSF) checks returned to tape them up in the shop window or customer service counter. The writers of those checks were very quick to come in and pay cash for the check just to get it out of the window before word got around town.
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