‘Surprisingly easy’ MIT entrance exam papers get viral; netizens react

In 1869, the entrance exam for the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was quite different from today's. A Reddit user recently shared an old MIT entrance exam from June 1869, sparking curiosity and conversation online.

The post has received over 37,000 upvotes, with people debating the difficulty of the exam.

MIT, renowned for its top-tier engineering, mathematics and science programmes, is notoriously tough to get into now, with an acceptance rate of just 4%. However, this 155-year-old exam paper seemed much simpler to many modern-day viewers.

Some users on Reddit admitted they found the algebra questions unexpectedly easy while others struggled.

One Redditor joked, "These aren't an, "If you can do these, we want you,"; these are an "If you CAN'T do these, don't even bother to reply"!"

“These days this is middle school-level math for future engineers. My daughter is working on this kind of thing at this moment in the first month of 7th grade. Nowadays, this would be appropriate for weeding out kids for an advanced math/science-focused high school, not for one of the world's top engineering colleges,” pointed out another user.

One user noted, “It says “algebra” at the top, so this is probably just the algebra section rather than the entire entrance exam. Maybe there is a calculus and other sections too.”

A different user quipped, “It's Good to know that I could have joined MIT in 1870,” while another said, “These are surprisingly easy. I didn't actually solve them, but there is nothing here I don't know how to solve, and I only have high-school-level math from decades ago.”

MIT not in Ivy League

Even though MIT is a prestigious institution, it is not a part of the Ivy League, a group of eight prestigious private research universities in the Northeastern United States. These are renowned for their academic excellence, competitive admissions, and high social standing.