How did Helen take her examinations at Radcliffe?
Answers
To enter Radcliffe, then the sister college of Harvard, a student had 16 hours of exams. The papers, handed out at Harvard, were sent to Radcliffe by messenger, and Keller was given a number.
As she had to type her exams, her identity was not secret. She took the exams in a room by herself, and a guard stood at the door to prevent anyone from entering.
Mr. Gilman read the German papers aloud to Keller, and she repeated the words to
make sure she had understood them. She then typed out the answers, and Mr. Gilman spelled to her what she had written. She made corrections that he inserted. However, in the final exams, no one read her work back to her.
Then, Mr. Gilman sent her work to the examiners with a note certifying that she had written them.
During her final exams for Radcliffe, one of the teachers at the Perkins Institution for the Blind copied the papers for her into American braille. She was proctored by someone she did not know. Right before the exam, she received an old copy of the algebra exam papers and realized that she did not understand the notation. She asked for a copy of the notations, and she had to study them. She also found the geometry exams confusing, as she was used to reading the problems in print or having them spelled into her hand. She found the braille perplexing, and she could not see
what she had written on her typewriter. She was also used to solving these types of problems mentally. She found it hard to read over all the signs correctly. In spite of these difficulties, she passed all her exams