MCAT Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills Practice Test 7

Nothing short of this curious sympathy could have brought into close relations two young men so hostile as Roony Lee and Henry Adams, but the chief difference between them as collegians consisted only in their difference of scholarship: Lee was a total failure; Adams a partial one. Both failed, but Lee felt his failure more sensibly, so that he gladly seized the chance of escape by accepting a commission offered him by General Winfield Scott in the force then being organized against the Mormons. He asked Adams to write his letter of acceptance, which flattered Adams's vanity more than any Northern compliment could do, because, in days of violent political bitterness, it showed a certain amount of good temper. The diplomat felt his profession.

If the student got little from his mates, he got little more from his masters. The four years passed at college were, for his purposes, wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did not want to be one in a hundred-one per cent of an education. He regarded himself as the only person for whom his education had value, and he wanted the whole of it. He got barely half of an average. Long afterwards, when the devious path of life led him back to teach in his turn what no student naturally cared or needed to know, he diverted some dreary hours of faculty-meetings by looking up his record in the class-lists, and found himself graded precisely in the middle. In the one branch he most needed-mathematics-barring the few first scholars, failure was so nearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value, and whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an accident or the personal favor of the professor. Here his education failed lamentably. At best he could never have been a mathematician; at worst he would never have cared to be one; but he needed to read mathematics, like any other universal language, and he never reached the alphabet.

Beyond two or three Greek plays, the student got nothing from the ancient languages. Beyond some incoherent theories of free-trade and protection, he got little from Political Economy. He could not afterwards remember to have heard the name of Karl Marx mentioned, or the title of "Capital." He was equally ignorant of Auguste Comte. These were the two writers of his time who most influenced its thought. The bit of practical teaching he afterwards reviewed with most curiosity was the course in Chemistry, which taught him a number of theories that befogged his mind for a lifetime. The only teaching that appealed to his imagination was a course of lectures by Louis Agassiz on the Glacial Period and Paleontology, which had more influence on his curiosity than the rest of the college instruction altogether. The entire work of the four years could have been easily put into the work of any four months in after life.

Harvard College was a negative force, and negative forces have value. Slowly it weakened the violent political bias of childhood, not by putting interests in its place, but by mental habits which had no bias at all. It would also have weakened the literary bias, if Adams had been capable of finding other amusement, but the climate kept him steady to desultory and useless reading, till he had run through libraries of volumes which he forgot even to their title-pages. Rather by instinct than by guidance, he turned to writing, and his professors or tutors occasionally gave his English composition a hesitating approval; but in that branch, as in all the rest, even when he made a long struggle for recognition, he never convinced his teachers that his abilities, at their best, warranted placing him on the rank-list, among the first third of his class. Instructors generally reach a fairly accurate gauge of their scholars' powers. Henry Adams himself held the opinion that his instructors were very nearly right, and when he became a professor in his turn, and made mortifying mistakes in ranking his scholars, he still obstinately insisted that on the whole, he was not far wrong. Student or professor, he accepted the negative standard because it was the standard of the school.

Material used in this particular passage has been adapted from the following source:

H. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. © 1918 by Houghton Mifflin Co.

1. Which of the following best characterizes the author's opinion of Adams' college experience?

• A. Positive, because Harvard College was a good school.
• B. Negative, because the four years at college were a complete waste.
• C. Mixed, because while Adams learned little, there was some value to the experience.
• D. It cannot be determined from the passage because the opinions expressed are Adams', not the author's.

2. The author's claim that in mathematics failure was so nearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value is most inconsistent with which of the following statements also made in the passage?

• A. Instructors generally reach a fairly accurate gauge of their scholars' powers.
• B. The four years passed at college were, for his purposes, wasted.
• C. The entire work of the four years could have been easily put into the work of any four months in after life.
• D. He regarded himself as the only person for whom his education had value, and he wanted the whole of it.

3. Which of the following statements is/are supported by information in the passage?

I. Adams was a man beholden to vanity regarding his appearance.

II. Adams returned to teach and was motivated by instilling a new generation with useful information that was well received by his students.

III. Adams had a predilection for politics and literature.

• A. I only
• B. III only
• C. I and III only
• D. I, II, and III

4. All of the following are suggested as occupations or interests held by Adams EXCEPT:

• A. college professor.
• B. paleontology.
• C. chemistry.
• D. military officer.

5. The author's primary purpose in the passage is to

• A. detail the academic life of a subpar college student's experience and lobby for changing the system of education.
• B. argue for the necessity of a liberal arts education in order to create a well-educated citizenry.
• C. critically recount Adams' college experiences.
• D. recount the positive and negative experiences of students at Harvard.