Yesterday’s post about moving back to in-person (and even face-to-face) assessments in universities has brought about some great discussions. Ironically, that wasn’t the post I wanted to write! The post I set out to write was this one, which I’ve had in the to-be-written queue for months.
Universities used to use oral examinations extensively. When and how did that change? Historian Christopher Stray investigated this question in the context of the ancient universities of Cambridge and Oxford back in 2001.1 I found this interesting enough that I wanted to briefly summarize Stray for interested readers, inasmuch as we’re now going through a similar transition. Stray argues that the shift resulted from and proceeded with
a change from assessments of students’ character to their cognitive ability
changes in subject matter, particularly the rise of natural philosophy (that is, science) at Cambridge (it matters that Newton was at Cambridge, not Oxford)
increases in undergraduate enrollment breaking the logistics of oral exams
institutional politics
Back in the day (before 1800 or so), Oxford and Cambridge examinations were “public, oral, and in Latin”. They also seem to have been much more like a defense: any member of the “community of MAs” (that is, anyone who had graduated and hung around for a while) could “challenge a candidate for the BA degree”, and eligibility for the conferral of a degree involved a public debate with a senior member of the community. Students by this point were practiced in disputation, because that was a major part of the curriculum; students practiced being both a challenger and a defendant (or “respondent”, apparently). (The contrast with, say, imperial Chinese examinations could not be greater.)
These traditional final oral examinations could go on for hours and seems to have been a bit of an intellectual fight club: “students were disputing with one another and with any graduates who might choose to throw brains. At the end, there was just a mark recording passage or failure; no rubrics or CYA note-taking for these undergraduates. The general sense Stray conveys that these disputations were less genteel exercises and more free-for-alls is bolstered by his comments that students might try to distinguish themselves by attacking individuals or institutions—a rare window for intellectual freedom, and risk, that authorities could not easily close. On the other hand, Stray suggests that many undergraduates used the early modern equivalent of Cliffs Notes or LLM— “manuscript copies of sets of standard arguments … handed down from one undergraduate generation to the next”.
These examinations involved disputing a thesis advanced by an author, with one side taking the pro and the other side the con positions. That meant that boring theses (Stray mentions Euclid) could not be advanced. Neither could heretical or immoral theses, like whether hell was eternal. The strength of the field was a mark of the examiners’ belief about the strength of the student: top-ranked students would be given strong foes, while lesser ones might discover how little examiners thought about them when they fought lesser lights.
Written examinations may have begun in the 16th century but accelerated in the 18th century in Cambridge. One reason for the change was the emergence of finer gradations among students, in which different grades of honors emerged; another was the increasing importance of, essentially, STEM subjects, which also pushed away from traditional Latin exams. A third was an increasing impatience with patronage and favoritism, which led to the sorting of students into rough grades of ability before assessments instead of mixed classes (mixed by ability). Eventually, the pressures for standard assessments and ranking would produce the end of oral examinations during the mid-19th century (depending on field of study).
Stray argues that the move away from orality accompanied the pressure for greater precision in class rankings. At first (1770s), questions were dictated and students could write their answers; from the 1790s, top-ranked students were given printed papers to work out solutions. Oral examinations were used for some time to, apparently, break ties or more finely distinguish between written answers, but the potential for subjectivity brought this period mostly to a close by about the late 1820s. Over the same period, the right of MAs to intervene in the examinations was curtailed as the number of professional examiners increased, while the prerogatives of senior administrators to award honors … honorarily was also hemmed in and then abolished.
By the early 1800s, exams at Cambridge were rigorous, written, and silent affairs—not intellectual street brawls. The end result was a precisely ordered set of students based on marks obtained through written exams. Written exams came to be favored in part because they could accommodate algebra and fine definitions more easily than oral exams.
Elaborate rituals evolved to commemorate performance on the exams—elaborate English rituals, it should be said, as the “Senior Wrangler” was celebrated for coming first in a separate ritual while the “Wooden Spoon” (the last of the students who took honors) was mocked by receiving a … can you guess … large spoon. These rituals, Stray writes, celebrated “the competitive system itself, dominated by a ranking procedure of unparalleled intensity and precision.” The system was pretty obviously more fair than letting the vice-chancellor pick favored candidates: I love that students could earn more than 100% if they produced “a more elegant solution to a problem than the standard example.”
These were also university, not college, exams (Oxford and Cambridge are universities made of many separate colleges), and many college-level scholars resented the loss of their power. One denounced proposals for new exams as “a hasty secret trial” that involved “no knowledge of candidates”—which, of course, was exactly the point. That move from local to university took place before the shift to written exams, but the general thrust is the same. The increasing use of the hand-me-down arguments seems to have contributed to a generally desultory air around oral examinations by the end of the eighteenth century.
(Incidentally, the article is full of asides like “Temple later followed Tait both as headmaster of Rugby and as Archbishop of Canterbury”, which is not doing much for my general presumption that England has more grand offices than sound men to fill them, or maybe even just people period.)
The contrast with Oxford, which did not embrace these written exams, was apparently profound: one contemporaneous observer wrote “I once passed a morning in the schools at Oxford and came away with a profound conviction of the intense injustice of using oral trials for the purpose of assigning relative rank for which men have toiled for years”. Oxford would only publicly rank the first twelve students, rather than the elaborate Cambridge system, but only a handful of students ever plumped for the challenge. The Oxford system also involved longer and more dramatic challenges: “In 1810, Sir William Hamilton [aged 22—ed.] offered a long list of books for examination and was grilled for twelve hours over two days in front of a large audience; the event concluded with the thanks of his questioners”—possibly the first time that “and then everyone clapped” has ever been literally true.
The Oxford system of oral exams collapsed because the university admitted more students but did not increase the number of examiners; by the end, the examiners had a backlog of students half-a-year long to clear. Written examinations became a practical necessity, although viva voce remained more prominent in Oxford for much longer (possibly because of religious motivations around High Anglican practices that I’m much too American to appreciate). Even in divinity, which preserved the viva longest, by the early twentieth century the pace of administration required to have oral exams—as many as 80 vivas a day, which makes me shudder—made the practice less dignified and more farcical. Still, Oxford sought to avoid precise rankings and preserve something that looks an awful lot like grade inflation (even if the grades were, apparently, handed out by Greek letters). I also can’t help but think that by this time Oxford was hanging on to orality because Cambridge was all-in on written.
That’s not to say that everyone loved oral examinations. One observer in the 1850s found that even if written work could deliver more precise arguments, “Viva voce examination catches out the crammer. It measures quality and competency while written papers produce classification.” These days, that kind of holistic approach screams progressive pedagogy, but it was a remark delivered by someone who seems to have become a reactionary crank.
What does all of this mean for us now? First, I think it reminds us that there’s nothing natural about what universities do; for several hundred years, Oxford and Cambridge assessed students through oral exams in Latin, and within a couple of decades they stopped doing that altogether. Second, it suggests that capacity constraints for oral exams are not new; it’s not exactly like Oxford in the 1820s was as large as, say, the University of Texas at Austin, and even then they couldn’t wrangle enough examiners. Third, oral examinations really did have many flaws, not least the fact that they were less precise and more subjectively graded than written examinations. A wholesale shift to oral exams in a more democratic context might lead to greater problems. Nevertheless, and finally, when the conditions and missions of a university change, the university must change as well—but that these changes will be accompanied by pretty bitter fights.
Stray, Christopher. “The shift from oral to written examination: Cambridge and Oxford 1700–1900.” Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice 8.1 (2001): 33-50.
Written vs oral is one aspect of this. Another is the incredibly elaborate Cambridge grading system, which people like GH Hardy fought to abolish.
https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Hardy_Tripos/
As we can see from complaints about grade inflation, which, like the "war on Christmas", have been going on as long as I have been old enough for grades to matter, people are incredibly invested in this kind of nonsense, more so nowadays for universities than for schools.
Yet as soon as students have got their first job, all this disappears. No employer uses elaborate grading systems except as a way of firing people (yank and rank) and hardly anyone applying for a second or subsequent job puts much weight on their college grades.