...My wife's father had an 8th grade education (common for growing up in the 1930's) and never had a diploma or a GED...
Neither did either one of my Granddads. But the subject is not as simple as it seems; a long time ago my dad found one of his dad's old history exams. It was harder than any history test any of us had ever taken and even our high school teachers said they would have had a helluva time passing it.
This is a bit off topic, but the talk about difficult tests reminded me of this.
I went to graduate school for physics. We took classes for the first two years and then the rest of the Ph.D. is research and dissertation. A few of the professors were notorious for giving impossibly difficult exams. I recall in electrodynamics, the tests were so hard that the best student might get only 50%. And these were take-home tests, not in-class tests, so we had plenty time to do them and could use books and such. We were not all given F's though... the best score would get the A and the rest would be graded compared to the top score. I think the professors did that to humble even the best of us.
The final exam for my third semester quantum mechanics course has kind of a funny story to it. Again, the exam was a take-home, but we were supposed to spend only a certain amount of time on it, starting from the time we opened the test - I think it was 12 hours or something like that, but it had to be turned in by noon on Friday. Of course, being a slacker, I waited until the night before it was due to start it, so I was up all night trying to do it. Anyway (here's the funny part), one of the questions had something to do with using "Goldstone's theorem" to prove something or other to do with the "Josephson Effect." I had a hell of a time and I finally gave up because I couldn't get it. When I turned in the exam to the professor, I asked about that problem. He said, "What's wrong, Josephson was only a 21 year old kid when he did it! Surely
you can do the work of a 21 year old kid...."
...
Yeah, come to find out, that was what Josephson won the Nobel Prize in physics for! Yes... we were asked to solve the problem that had won Josephson his Nobel Prize....
