Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

An exam for eighth graders is frustrating many Americans. It looks like most eighth graders won't be able to pass it, and even many adults think the questions are daunting.

But this is not the crazy work of a drunk at a test design company. It is a grade level exam that was given to real students in Bullitt County, Kentucky in 1912.

This is precisely why so many people are unnerved. It seems to be clear evidence that education standards in the US have been declining, an opinion that has often been expressed by some educators and parents in recent years.

The concern can be summarized by a reader's comment left on the website of the Washington Post, where the exam questions were first published: "The kids taking, and mostly passing, the 1912 exam made the 20th century the American Century. The kids taking today's exam will make the 21st century the Chinese Century. "

But when you look into the exam, you'll see the questions are a little different in style from those found in its equivalents today.

It contains the spellings of 40 words read by the teacher such as "rhinoceros" and "eccentric," problems like "How many steps of 2 ft. 4 in. each will a man take in walking 21.4 miles?" as well as questions like "Name three rights given Congress by the Constitution and two rights denied Congress."

It heavily focused on memorization and basic calculation compared to today's middle school level exams, which are more analytical in nature.

For example, a question concerning the US Constitution from the social studies exam for eighth graders in New York State in 2010 asked: "Which feature of the constitution prevents one branch of the national government from becoming too powerful?" The choices are: federal supremacy; checks and balances; electoral college; and the elastic clause.

So any weaknesses in the educational levels of today's kids may not be caused by a declining education system, but the different skills needed and, therefore, tested, in a different era. And there is nothing wrong with this.

It's the same as if I had to take the imperial exam in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), which required writing essays in a certain style. But fortunately, that style is long obsolete and no one writes like that way anymore.

What concerns me more, though, is that the 101-year-old exam in Kentucky looks close to the exams given to middle school students in China today.

Different cities in China may have different exams for high school entrance, but one can easily tell from the exams released on the Internet that memorization and calculation are still the major foundation of the answers.

We do have our proud moments, thanks to our extraordinary talent for these two skills.

In the recent movie American Dreams in China, Cheng Dongqing, the founder of a test preparation school, impresses Americans in negotiations by being able to accurately recite any clause of a whole book on copyright protection.

In reality, many Chinese students who don't speak English get higher scores in the Graduate Record Examinations than native born Americans, by completely relying on memorization and calculation.

But in general, we still need to ask, in a time when encyclopedic knowledge is just a click away on the computer, why do we keep trying to inject everything that can be stored in a hard drive into the brains of our youngsters?

It is true the omnipotence of computers has already degraded some of our conventional abilities. This is sad and even horrible for many brought up under a different system. Take spelling. According to various surveys in recent years, 50 percent of the British and 60 percent of Americans cannot spell the word "embarrassed," and 70 percent of Chinese cannot write the character for "toad." But I won't be surprised if people a century later are about as nostalgic for the lost spelling skills as we are now for the tails we had before humans evolved.

The real perk is that if we stop stuffing kids with what they can easily get on Google, they may have more energy to study how to make something like Google. That is a much more important ability for the future.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com