Graduation Trivia
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97 free Graduation trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free graduation trivia questions with answers. Everyone has sat through a graduation, but few people know why the hat is square, why the tassel moves, or why an English march written for a king plays at every American high school. This quiz covers the ceremony from every angle: medieval gowns and hoods, the 1895 code that standardised American regalia, valedictorians and Latin honours, Gaudeamus igitur, honorary degrees for frogs, doctoral swords in Finland, and the commencement speeches everyone quotes but nobody attributes correctly. It starts easy (what a mortarboard resembles, what cum laude means) and works up to the history and worldwide customs that make good grad-party or classroom trivia: the year of the first US PhD, the first woman to earn a doctorate, and where the cap toss began. Free to use for a graduation party, a senior assembly or a teacher's end-of-year quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on academic dress, degrees, ceremonies and speeches, and each question carries its source. No recycled listicle errors.
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Q 01Which Latin word meaning 'step' gives English the word 'degree'?
Gradus
Gradus, Latin for 'step', reached English as 'degree' through Old French degré, and the same root makes a graduate, literally, someone who has taken a step.
Q 02The square academic cap gets its common nickname from its resemblance to a tool used by whom?
Bricklayers
Bricklayers carry mortar on a flat square board called a hawk, and the flat square top of the academic cap earned it the nickname mortarboard.
Q 03In American commencements, undergraduates typically begin with the tassel on which side of the cap?
Right
Right is the starting side: the tassel hangs on the right of the cap until the degree is conferred, then graduates move it to the left.
Q 04In 1895, an intercollegiate commission standardised what for American colleges?
Academic dress
Academic dress got one shared code; the commission's technical adviser, Gardner Cotrell Leonard, was himself a gown-maker, a partner in the Albany family firm that went on to supply caps and gowns to many universities.
Q 05How many velvet bands appear on the sleeves of an American doctoral gown?
Three
Three velvet bars cross each sleeve of the American doctoral gown, matching the velvet facings down its front; doctors may also swap the mortarboard for a velvet tam.
Q 06What do the lining colours of an American academic hood show?
The university
The university: the lining carries the colours of the institution that granted the degree, while the velvet trim shows the field of study, so a practised eye can read where the wearer studied and what.
Q 07Under the American code, which tassel colour is reserved for those entitled to wear the doctoral gown?
Gold
Gold is kept by the code for doctors, with everyone else in black or a subject colour; at the old English universities a gold tassel, the 'tuft', marked a titled undergraduate, hence 'tuft-hunter' for a toady who courts the grand.
Q 08Which colour does the American code assign to science?
Golden yellow
Golden yellow is the code's colour for science; green marks medicine, purple law and white arts and letters.
Q 09What practical job did the academic gown probably do for medieval scholars?
To keep the wearer warm
To keep the wearer warm is the usual account: medieval scholars, most of them clerics, are thought to have needed long robes and hoods against the cold of unheated halls.
Q 10Who composed the Pomp and Circumstance marches, a staple of American graduations?
Edward Elgar
Edward Elgar wrote five Pomp and Circumstance marches between 1901 and 1930; the slow tune from the first was reused in his ode for Edward VII's coronation before any graduating class marched to it.
Q 11At which university was Pomp and Circumstance first played at a graduation ceremony, in 1905?
Yale
Yale gave the composer an honorary doctorate of music that day and played his march as the graduates filed out; Princeton, Chicago and Columbia soon copied it, and the habit spread from there.
Q 12The trio tune of Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 is better known in Britain by what name?
Land of Hope and Glory
Land of Hope and Glory gained its words from A. C. Benson in 1902, reportedly after Edward VII said the melody would make a great song; it is now sung at the Last Night of the Proms.
Q 13The word 'valedictorian' comes from a Latin phrase meaning what?
To say farewell
Q 21David Foster Wallace's celebrated 2005 commencement speech 'This Is Water' was delivered where?
Kenyon College
Kenyon College's students chose Wallace as their 2005 speaker from a shortlist that included then-Senator Hillary Clinton; the speech spread online and was published as a book in 2009.
Q 22The 'Wear Sunscreen' speech often credited to Vonnegut was really a 1997 newspaper column by whom?
Mary Schmich
Mary Schmich wrote it as a mock commencement speech on June 1, 1997; a chain email then credited it to Kurt Vonnegut, who said he would have been proud had the words been his.
Q 23Which film director turned the 'Wear Sunscreen' column into a single that topped the UK chart in 1999?
Baz Luhrmann
To say farewell is the sense of Latin 'vale dicere', and it fits the job: the valedictorian traditionally gives the last speech of the ceremony, the class's goodbye before it scatters.
Q 14In Australia, what Latin title is given to the highest-ranking student in a graduating class?
Dux
Dux, Latin for 'leader', was a Roman commander's title long before schools in Australia, New Zealand and Scotland borrowed it for their top pupil; the same word gave English 'duke'.
Q 15What does 'magna cum laude' translate to?
With great praise
With great praise is the middle rung, above plain cum laude and below summa; one New England college set up the three as grades around 1881 so that it could stop ranking every student on a scale of a hundred.
Q 16What does the title of the traditional academic song 'Gaudeamus igitur' mean?
So let us rejoice
So let us rejoice opens a student song also known as 'On the Shortness of Life': it tells the young to enjoy themselves while they can, which made it a favourite drinking song before it became an anthem.
Q 17Which composer quoted 'Gaudeamus igitur' in the finale of his Academic Festival Overture?
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms wrote the Academic Festival Overture in 1880 to thank the University of Breslau for an honorary doctorate, and Gaudeamus igitur crowns its finale.
Q 18A graduation is called a 'commencement' because medieval graduates were beginning what?
Their careers as masters
Their careers as masters: in a medieval university the ceremony marked a new master's 'inception', the start of his licence to teach, so it celebrated a beginning rather than an end.
Q 19Which economic programme was announced in a June 1947 commencement address at a Massachusetts university?
The Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was outlined by Secretary of State George C. Marshall in his June 5, 1947 address; Congress funded it as the European Recovery Program in 1948.
Q 20Steve Jobs closed his 2005 Stanford speech with 'Stay hungry, stay foolish', a sign-off line from which publication?
The Whole Earth Catalog
The Whole Earth Catalog printed the words beneath a photo of an empty country road on the back cover of its final issue; Jobs told the graduates it had been 'sort of like Google in paperback form'.
Baz Luhrmann set the column to a choral remix of a dance hit as 'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)', with voice actor Lee Perry reading the advice, and it entered the British chart at number one.
Q 24What does 'honoris causa', attached to an honorary degree, mean?
For the sake of the honour
For the sake of the honour means no course or exams were asked of the recipient; one of the earliest on record went at Oxford in the late 1470s to Lionel Woodville, brother of Edward IV's queen.
Q 25Which Muppet received an honorary doctorate from Southampton College in 1996?
Kermit the Frog
Kermit the Frog collected an honorary Doctorate of Amphibious Letters at the Long Island college's 1996 commencement and delivered the graduation address himself.
Q 26Which of these American universities has, on principle, never awarded an honorary degree?
MIT
MIT has never given one: founder William Barton Rogers dismissed honorary degrees as 'literary almsgiving ... of spurious merit and noisy popularity', and the institute has held that line since its first graduation in 1868.
Q 27Which Founding Father called himself 'Doctor' after honorary doctorates from St Andrews and Oxford?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin received an honorary doctorate from St Andrews in 1759 and another from Oxford in 1762; he never attended a university, yet 'Dr Franklin' stuck for life.
Q 28The research doctorate first awarded in America in 1861 was modelled on the universities of which country?
Germany
Germany: the modern PhD grew out of the research university founded in Berlin in 1810, and Americans crossed the Atlantic to earn one until a college at home began awarding its own in 1861.
Q 29At which Italian university did the Venetian Elena Cornaro Piscopia become the first woman PhD in 1678?
Padua
Padua's cathedral hosted the ceremony on 25 June 1678; she had sought a degree in theology, but the local bishop refused it to a woman and allowed her philosophy instead.
Q 30Which is the oldest university in Europe in continuous operation?
Bologna
Bologna dates its founding to 1088; its students organised themselves into guilds, the original 'universitas', and hired their own professors.