Unless you avoided the Internet this past week, you probably saw Harvard's olde thyme-y 1869 entrance exam [PDF]. If you haven't seen it, it's worth your perusal—if only so you can come to terms with the fact that you couldn't have gotten into Harvard in 1869. Too much Latin and Greek. (The exam's math stuff, on the other hand, looks doable.)
Naturally, after seeing what it once took to get into Harvard, I wondered about Columbia's old test. And while I couldn't find anything from 1869, I did manage to find an 1898 letter to the New York Times describing Columbia's exam at that time—which, oh man, sounds like a doozy.
