I'd probably stumble with a lot of my high school or college classes' exams, at least with some of the specifics (with the exception of history which is where my career lies), even when I'd do fine with the material back when I was studying it. That hangs around to the present too; I spent a few years as a cost estimator for a construction company and was very good at it, but if I ran into that again ten years down the road I'd probably flounder for awhile until I got my bearings again.
It's the same with tests like that - a reasonably competent person could probably spend an evening studying - far, far less time than these kids would have spent - and then handle the test well enough. They might need more than an evening to 'truly' pass it, e.g., getting the right answers as the teachers in 1900 would have defined them, rather than our own. People obviously aren't going to do that, though, not for something they came across while browsing the news, so all most of us will see is "I don't immediately know that and that and that and that and that means I'm less intelligent than these kids who were immersed in it for months on end! Oh emm gee Idiocracy!"
My beef with education these days is something that I would have had with it back then as well - the focus on knowing facts, as you mention and I started by mentioning, instead of interpretation or synthesis or the like. I've been on the fun side of the desk in history classrooms a few times, and the students almost always started by assuming all there was to the subject was memorizing names, places and dates and bringing them back on recall. Those are prominent in modern exams, just as they were in this one. If you look at the 1900 test's history section, there's only one question that isn't necessarily a regurgitation one - #6 - and even that probably had a predefined Correct Answer.
There's a couple of pretty good questions in each of the sections (aside from the arithmetic section where they're all fine), but overall I find the test more interesting in terms of the sorts of things they found important, and the sorts of answers they were looking for. I don't deny for a second that contemporary education could use a swift sharp boot to the head at times as well, but the exams I took in junior high in the early nineties weren't that much different from these ones except for the information they were looking for. Some of mine might have been quite a bit stronger, as the English and social studies courses had substantial essay components, while the Bullitt one seems to be looking for a few words to a sentence or two for most of the questions.
So yeah. The "I've babbled on at embarrassing length" summary is that I find this really interesting as a look into education back then, but I don't really find it alarming.
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. And the answer to all 4 parts of Question 1 of the history test would be "American Indians", although it probably would have been counted wrong.
