College & University Trivia
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185 free College & University trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free College & University trivia questions with answers. This university trivia quiz roams the world's campuses: the medieval origins of Bologna, al-Qarawiyyin, Oxford and Cambridge, the colonial colleges that became Harvard, William & Mary, Yale and Princeton, the eight Ivies, Stanford's grieving founders, MIT's mission, land-grant colleges, Rhodes Scholarships and the world's largest university by enrolment. It also has plenty of fun college trivia questions for students and alumni: where the word 'campus' was first used, what alma mater actually means, the first fraternity, the Boat Race, the mortarboard, the SAT's original name and the birth of the MOOC. Easy questions suit orientation-week icebreakers and dorm quiz nights; the harder ones on dates and founders will test faculty too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 185 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which university, teaching since around 1088, is regarded as the oldest in continuous operation?
Bologna
Bologna's university, teaching since about 1088, grew out of guilds of students who hired and paid their own professors, so at first it was the students who ran the place.
Q 02In which city is al-Qarawiyyin, founded in 859 and cited by UNESCO as the world's oldest higher-learning institution?
Fez
Fez, Morocco, is home to al-Qarawiyyin; by tradition Fatima al-Fihri, a rich merchant's daughter, spent her inheritance founding it as a mosque in 859, and it grew into a famed centre of learning.
Q 03The word 'university' comes from the Latin universitas, meaning what?
A whole or community
A whole or community is the core sense of universitas, which in medieval Latin could mean any guild or corporation; guilds of masters and students took the name, and it stuck to their schools.
Q 04A medieval legend, long believed, credited which Anglo-Saxon king with founding Oxford University?
Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great was said to have started Oxford by the chronicler Ranulf Higden in the 1300s, a tale believed into the 18th century; teaching there is in fact documented only from 1096.
Q 05Which Oxford college did Cardinal Wolsey found in 1525 as Cardinal College?
Christ Church
Christ Church began as Wolsey's Cardinal College in 1525; after his fall Henry VIII refounded it in 1546 as Christ Church, whose chapel doubles as Oxford's cathedral.
Q 06Cambridge students celebrate the end of exams in 'May Week', which is actually held in which month?
June
June is when May Week now falls: its balls and boat races once came in May, before exams, but they moved to after them in 1882 and nobody changed the name.
Q 07Tour guides call Harvard's John Harvard statue the 'Statue of Three Lies' partly because its inscription gives him which title?
Founder
Founder is carved on the plinth beside the date 1638, yet the colony's legislature created the college in 1636 and John Harvard was its first big benefactor; even the face is a student model's.
Q 08Harvard's Widener Library honours an alumnus who died in the sinking of which ship?
Titanic
Harry Elkins Widener, Harvard class of 1907, died on the Titanic in 1912; his mother Eleanor funded Widener Library in his memory, and it opened in 1915.
Q 09America's second-oldest college, chartered in 1693 and named for William III and Mary II, is in which state?
Virginia
Virginia is home to William & Mary, in Williamsburg; a college for the colony was planned as early as 1618, but an attack on the settlers in 1622 ended that scheme, and Harvard opened first.
Q 10Yale, founded in 1701, took its name in 1718 from Elihu Yale, who was asked for money to do what?
Construct a new building
Construct a new building was the plea Cotton Mather put to Elihu Yale; the East India Company merchant sent books, a portrait of George I and bales of goods for the college to sell.
Q 11Which Yale secret society meets in a windowless Egypto-Doric 'tomb' built in 1856?
Skull and Bones
Skull and Bones was founded in 1832 by Yale students William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft, whose son William Howard Taft later joined it on his way to the White House.
Q 12Princeton was founded in 1746 under what name?
The College of New Jersey
The College of New Jersey was Princeton's name from its 1746 charter until 1896, when it became a university and marked its 150th anniversary by taking the name of its home town.
Q 13How many universities make up the Ivy League?
Eight
Eight universities, all in the north-eastern United States, make up the league; 'Ivy' was sports-page shorthand from the 1930s, and the league itself only took shape in 1954 as an athletic conference.
Q 21What does the Latin phrase 'alma mater' literally mean?
Nourishing mother
Nourishing mother is the literal Latin; Romans gave the title alma mater to goddesses such as Ceres and Cybele, and only many centuries later did universities borrow it for themselves.
Q 22Which honour society, the oldest in the United States, did five William & Mary students found in 1776?
Phi Beta Kappa
Phi Beta Kappa first met on December 5, 1776, as a secret society with a Greek motto; chapters at Yale and Harvard followed within five years, setting the pattern for Greek-letter societies on American campuses.
Q 23Union College, birthplace of Kappa Alpha in 1825, is nicknamed the 'Mother of' what?
Fraternities
Q 14Which is the only Ivy League school not founded during the colonial period?
Cornell
Cornell was founded in 1865, after the Civil War, by a telegraph millionaire who wanted a place where 'any person can find instruction in any study'; the other seven Ivies all began as colonial colleges.
Q 15Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of whom?
Their only child
Leland Stanford Jr, their only child, died of typhoid in 1884 aged 15; the university opened on the family's Palo Alto farm in 1891.
Q 16Which electronics firm did two of Frederick Terman's Stanford students start in a Palo Alto garage in 1939?
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard began when Terman, the professor later credited with seeding Silicon Valley, urged Bill Hewlett and David Packard into business; an early order came from Walt Disney, for sound gear used on Fantasia.
Q 17Which Latin motto did MIT adopt, reflecting William Barton Rogers's belief in learning by doing?
Mens et Manus
Mens et Manus, 'mind and hand', sums up Rogers's plan to teach science through practical work; Veritas belongs to Harvard and Lux et Veritas to Yale.
Q 18Cecil Rhodes, whose will funded the Rhodes Scholarship, made his fortune in which industry?
Diamond mining
Diamond mining made Cecil Rhodes rich: he bought up rival claims at Kimberley until his De Beers company dominated the world market, and his will turned that fortune into the Oxford scholarships.
Q 19The 1862 Morrill Act created which kind of American college?
Land-grant colleges
The Morrill Act gave each state federal land to endow land-grant colleges teaching agriculture, engineering and military tactics alongside classical studies.
Q 20Which Indian city's university was founded in 1857, the same year as Bombay and Madras?
Calcutta
Calcutta's university dates from January 1857; modelled on the University of London, it at first taught no one itself and only examined the students of its affiliated colleges.
Fraternities as Americans know them began at Union College in Schenectady, New York: Sigma Phi and Delta Phi followed Kappa Alpha there in 1827, and the trio became the model for social fraternities across North America.
Q 24The word 'campus', first used academically at Princeton in 1774, is Latin for what?
Field
Field is what the Latin campus means; Princeton students used it for the open ground around their college, and by 1900 the word had spread to college grounds across America.
Q 25Which is Germany's oldest university, founded in 1386?
Heidelberg
Heidelberg became a university town in 1386, when Elector Ruprecht I won the pope's permission to found one in his capital; it is still formally named for him, as the Ruperto Carola.
Q 26The Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, first held in 1829, is rowed on which river?
The Thames
The Boat Race is rowed on the Thames in London over the 4.2-mile course from Putney to Mortlake; the first race, in 1829, was held at Henley.
Q 27Which disputed result did the 1877 Boat Race produce?
A dead heat
A dead heat was the verdict, the only one in the race's history: with no finishing posts to sight along, judge 'Honest John' Phelps could not split the crews, though Oxford were sure they had won.
Q 28For much of its history, what did the letters SAT stand for?
Scholastic Aptitude Test
Scholastic Aptitude Test was the name from the first sitting in 1926; in the 1990s it became the Scholastic Assessment Test, and the College Board then ruled that the letters no longer stand for anything.
Q 29The first SAT was adapted from which US service's intelligence tests?
Army
Army recruits sat the Alpha exam during the First World War; psychologist Carl Brigham, who had helped give those tests, reshaped them into the SAT for the College Board.
Q 30Which acronym, coined in 2008, names free online university courses open to unlimited numbers of students?
MOOC
MOOC, short for massive open online course, was coined by Dave Cormier in 2008 for a Canadian university course that let anyone on the internet join in free alongside its paying students.