’All students in the University who are above one year’s standing, and have not taken their batchelor’ (of arts) ’degree, are required by statute to be present at this awful solemnity’ (disputation for a degree), ’which is designed for a public proof of the progress he has made in the art of reasoning; tho’ in fact it is no more than a formal repetition of a set of syllogisms upon some ridiculous question in logick, which they get by rote, or, perhaps, only read out of their caps, which lie before them with their notes in them. These commodious sets of syllogisms are call’d strings, and descend from undergraduate to undergraduate, in regular succession; so that, when any candidate for a degree is to exercise his talent in argumentation, he has nothing else to do but to enquire amongst his friends for a string upon such-and-such a question.’
So, even in the early part of the present century, reverend persons proceeding to the degree of D.D. have been known to avail themselves of a thesis (or written harangue on some point of theology) not compiled by their unaided exertions, but kept among the archives of their college and passed round as occasion might require. If mature theologians have reconciled this with their consciences in the nineteenth, what may not have been possible to an undergraduate in the eighteenth century? Also, the functionary who stood in the place of the modern examiner was a very different kind of person from his successor--that incarnation of cold and impassive criticism; collusion between ’opponent’ and ’respondent’ must have been possible and frequent; and so far had things gone that the candidate for a degree was permitted to choose the ’Master’ who was to examine him, and it appears to have been customary to invite your Master to dinner on the night preceding the final disputation. Witness ’Terrae Filius ’once more:--
’Most candidates get leave .... to chuse their own examiners, who never fail to be their old cronies and toping companions.... It is also well known to be the custom for the candidates either to present their examiners with a piece of gold, or to give them a handsome entertainment, and make them drunk, which they commonly do the night before examination, and some times keep them till morning, and so adjourn, cheek by jowl, from their drinking-room to the school, where they are to be examined.’