Changing value of examination tests.
The value of the tests to which degrees have been attached in the past has varied considerably, and the same is true of the present. The M.A. degree in the xvi and following century was obtained with little or no examination; the disputations, as we have seen, were often idle forms, but the improvement in methods dates from 1680 when the proctors were replaced by moderators as overseers in the sophisters’ school. Fifty years later the building of the Senate House opened the new era, and the next twenty years (1730-50) saw rapid progress; so that the Cambridge degree was still something better than the Oxford when at the end of that century aspirants for degrees at both universities were adequately described as “term-trotters.”[298] The conspicuous university learning of the xvii century was untested and unstimulated by any adequate examination test; but earlier still the sheer number of years passed at a university must have had a value which is now lost. Seven years was the rule at Cambridge in the xv, xvi and xvii centuries, and the early history of the oldest of Cambridge colleges shows us the Peterhouse students residing all the year round.[299] Nowadays the standards of the honour and “poll” degree[300] are so wide apart that the terms bachelors and masters of arts applied equally to all degree work, are misleading. “He only wanted to take his degree, he did not work much” someone said to me a short time ago, and one felt one knew that degree. The honours class standard is also variable, and “a good year” raises the first class standard unduly.
The double tripos.
The condition which characterised Cambridge studies before 1850 was that the mathematical tripos was obligatory on all candidates for honours. Between 1823 therefore and 1850 every classic was obliged to pass in one of the three classes of the mathematical tripos—he had, that is, to satisfy the examiners in two triposes. The results were often curious. Men like Macaulay, who became fellows of their college, were “ploughed” in the tripos, and professors of classics wrote M.A. after their names in virtue of a “poll” degree. The native repugnance to mathematical method in some men’s minds was constantly shown and at all stages of the university curriculum; Stratford Canning was “sorely puzzled” and indeed “in an agony of despair” over the study for which he was a “volunteer” at King’s, and Gray refused to graduate rather than pursue it. On the other hand the Cambridge “double first” meant a degree unrivalled in any part of the world.[301]
