" There is no appearance of collective examination before
this presentation: what the "Quaestio" might be, I do not know. Still
the undergraduate was not B.A. The Quaestio however was finished and
approved before the day of a certain Congregation, and then the
undergraduate was declared to be "actualiter in artibus Baccalaureum."
Probably these regulations were found to be insufficient for the
control of education, and the January examination was instituted. I
conjecture this to have been at or shortly before the date of the
earliest Triposes recorded in the Cambridge Calendar, 1748.
The increasing importance of the January examination naturally
diminished the value of the Acts in the eyes of the undergraduates;
and, a few years after my M.A. degree, it was found that the Opponents
met, not for the purpose of concealing their arguments from the
Respondent, but for the purpose of revealing them to him. This led to
the entire suppression of the system. The most active man in this
suppression was Mr Whewell: its date must have been near to 1830.
The shape in which the arguments were delivered by an Opponent,
reading from a written paper, was, "Si (quoting something from the
Respondent's challenge), &c.
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