The History of Written Assessments
The History of Assessment Series
By Emily Andrews
Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
When we think about testing, most of us imagine sitting quietly in front of a piece of paper with a pen or pencil in hand. However, written examinations are a relatively new development in the history of education. Before the 19th century, most assessments were conducted orally and in public. They primarily took the form of disputation or vive voce (“with the living voice”) at the higher levels. It was not until the widespread changes represented by the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that testing became a private, written affair.
The Renaissance and the Written Word
The first seeds of the shift from oral to written examination can be traced back to the spread of humanism during the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries. At that time there was a renewed emphasis on texts as objects of study, as opposed to skills in the abstract like logic and rhetoric. Humanists anchored their contemplation of transcendent issues (such as moral philosophy, politics, or virtue) in specific works by authors like Virgil and Ovid. Study of the liberal arts was married to the study of books in a way that seems obvious to those in the classical education movement today, but was not as widespread then.
Furthermore, the humanist trend in educational philosophy was paired with another significant milestone in human history: the invention of the printing press. In The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction, Jerry Brotton notes that, by 1500, more books were printed by the new presses that appeared in all the major cities of Northern Europe after 1440 than had been produced since the fall of the Roman Empire. (1) All of a sudden, books were not just in fashion, they were also easy to obtain.
More people beyond clerics and scholars were able to collect private libraries as books became cheaper and more accessible. Consequently, books also started to become available in languages other than Latin and Greek – literacy caught fire among laymen and the common classes like never before. At the same time, there was a rise in paper production in Europe in the late Middle Ages that replaced more expensive vellum (made from animal skin), making notebooks and letter-writing materials easier to purchase. Brotton writes, “A culture based on communication through listening, looking, and speaking gradually changed into a culture that interacted through reading and writing.” (2)
Significantly, Brotton also argues that the printing press made reading a repeatable process. While no two manuscripts are the same, print facilitated “exact mass reproduction” so that two people miles apart could study and compare the exact same text, down to the very word and page. As a result, “textual scholarship became a cumulative science” as editions were also able to be compared, amended, and reissued. Centuries later, the exact and reproducible nature of the written word would become significant for the advance of written examinations.
The Shift from Oral to Written Assessment
In an article on the history of written examinations at Cambridge and Oxford, Christopher Stray suggests that the first report of a written assessment in Europe can be found in Trinity College’s 1560 “Elizabethan statutes.” (3) The date corresponds to the increase in writing that took place during the Renaissance, but, for the most part, evaluations for placement and degree conferral still took the form of interactive debate among instructors and peers until the early 19th century.
However, in 1702, a fellow of Trinity College named Richard Bentley began the push for written examinations at Cambridge that would eventually snowball and change the institution’s assessments forever. He advocated for vive voce examinations to be replaced with written exercises so that there might be “time allowed to weigh and compare the respective merits of the young men with suitable deliberation.” In Bentley’s view, the passions of the moment in a public deliberation could unfairly influence a candidate’s results. And, indeed, there are many documented instances of favoritism or prejudice interfering with an examination’s outcomes. As Stray observes, “In such interactive assessment the character and ability of those playing the other parts were crucial.” (4) The social dynamics of vive voce were seen by its critics as an imprecise and unstable factor in measuring outcomes – a concern very much indicative of the Enlightenment’s desire for “objective” and “scientific” knowledge.
Over the course of the 18th century, Cambridge became dominated by a Newtonian approach to scientific inquiry, which prioritized the truth of reproducible data over dialectic and oratorical prowess. Simultaneously, the atmosphere at Cambridge became affected by a liberal latitudinarian (tolerant) movement in the Church of England which emphasized the “ideological concept of the individual” in opposition to any authoritative social establishment. Stray connects this religious movement to a growing trend among Masters at Cambridge to assess fellows individually instead of in a crowd, where their performance could shift under social pressures. (5) By the 1830s, vive voce had all but died out at Cambridge, and, in the 1840s, examination boards were established to ensure that evaluations were executed by unbiased, outside parties instead of potentially prejudiced Masters who had preconceived notions of the student being assessed.
Opponents to these changes argued that external examiners were actually at a disadvantage in their ability to meaningfully evaluate students. For example, William Powell, a master at St. John’s College in Cambridge, protested in 1772 that the context of social classroom interaction was essential to what was being assessed, especially in non-mathematical subjects. (6) Questions and modes of argumentation could be tailored by a student’s teacher to suit the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses.
In 1850, William Whewell gave similarly critical evidence in a Royal Commission that looked into the state of affairs at Cambridge. He argued that viva voce “measures quality and competency while written papers produce classification.” Whewell viewed oral examination as the foundation for handing down lasting truth as opposed to the ephemeral knowledge of research-based inquiry. (7) It affirmed the formation of souls instead of the identification of functionaries.
The Logistical Case for Written Assessment
For both Cambridge and Oxford (where vive voce held out much longer), the final nail in the coffin was the influx of students that flooded the schools in the 1820s. One of many causes for this development is the fact that industrialization brought about a new demand for specialized knowledge; more people needed certification to obtain work, and the explosion of growth in the middle classes meant more people could afford to get it.
Suddenly the logistics of oral examination became untenable. Because students could only be tested one at a time and disputations were necessarily lengthy, examiners in Oxford once spent half a year trying to work through their backlog of candidates. (8) Eventually a system where multiple students could test at once under a reproducible set of questions won out.
Those in favor of the shift to written assessments, like certain contributors to the 1852 Royal Commission on Oxford, suggested that printing questions had the effect of “giving a certain stability to the system of Examinations.” One argued that “the relative merits of different candidates can not be fully determined unless they are all tested by the same examination.” (9)
While the shift could be seen as entirely an innovation of Enlightenment thinking, Ben Wilbrink makes the case in an article for Studies in Educational Evaluation that a static set of questions finds its historical precedent in the form of the catechism. In fact, when it came to testing the simple accumulation of knowledge throughout history, he writes, “Question and answer was the dominant didactic form in teaching and learning.” (10) Although there was a time and place for evaluating a student’s capacity for reasoning and rhetorical display, the daily business of education consisted in ascertaining a student’s grasp of essential knowledge. Wilbrink likens the first written examinations at Oxford and Cambridge to the catechetical method of interrogative call and declarative response, because “no questions were put that allowed different interpretations.” (11).
Traditional Principles of Assessment for a Modern World
When a test offers questions that only have one correct answer to multiple students, the results necessarily measure an individual’s progress against other test-takers. There is no room for the insights into a student’s character or understanding that can only be born of a relational environment. However, such tests do allow decision-makers to survey a much larger pool of results than would otherwise be possible.
The history of assessments at Cambridge and Oxford suggest that there is a time and place for both oral and written testing. For now, written exams dominate the college admissions landscape. CLT remains committed to creating assessments that both honor the eternal truths while serving the current needs of colleges and the students who attend them. Meanwhile, should assessments measure “quality and competency,” or should they be stable and scalable? At CLT, we think they can do both.
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(1.) Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Chapter 2, Kindle edition. Many of the arguments Brotton makes in this book should be weighted carefully. His claims are often oversimplified in light of the historical evidence. However, he is helpful in this context for understanding the broad shape of the timeline.
(2.) Ibid.
(3.) Christopher Stray, “The Shift from Oral to Written Examination: Cambridge and Oxford 1700-1900,” Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 8.1 (2001): 36.
(4.) Ibid., 35.
(5.) Ibid., 42.
(6.) Ibid., 40.
(7.) Ibid., 46.
(8.) Ibid., 43.
(9.) Ibid., 46.
(10.) Ben Wilbrink, “Assessment in Historical Perspective,” Studies in Educational Evaluation, 23, no.1 (1997): 33.
(11.) Ibid.
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Emily Andrews is the Marketing Content Manager for CLT. She lives with her husband and daughter in Spokane, WA and enjoys hoarding books, eating good meals, and failing to complete crossword puzzles.
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Published on 4th September 2026.