The universities which have departed furthest from the medieval system of examinations, at any rate in appearance, are those of Germany. The baccalaureate has disappeared, but students cannot be matriculated without having passed the _Abiturienten-examen_ (see below), probably the most severe of all entrance examinations (foreign students may be exempted under certain conditions). The student desiring to proceed to the doctorate is free from examinations thereafter until he presents his thesis for the doctor's degree,[2] when, if it is accepted, he is submitted to a public oral examination not only in his principal subject (_Hauptfach_), but also as a rule in two or more collateral subjects (_Nebenfächer_). The doctor's degree does not give the right to teach in a faculty (_venia legendi_). To acquire this a doctor must present a further thesis (_Habilitationsschrift_), and must deliver two lectures, one before the faculty, followed by a discussion (_colloquium_), the other in public; but these lectures "seem to be merely secondary and are tending to become so more and more"; "scientific productiveness is so sharply emphasized among the conditions for admission that it overshadows all the rest" (Paulsen, loc. cit. p. 165).
In France the examination for the baccalaureate, though conducted in part by university examiners, has become a school-leaving examination (see below). The licentiateship has been preserved in the faculties of arts, science and laws, and is in point of difficulty about equal to the pass degree examinations of the university of London, though differing in the nature of the tests. In the faculty of sciences, the three subjects of examination selected may, under a recent regulation, be taken separately. Until a few years ago the successful candidates at the licentiateship were arranged in order of merit. For the doctorate in the faculty of letters two theses must be submitted, of which the subject and plan must be approved by the faculty (until recently one of them was required to be written in Latin). Permission to print the theses is given by the rector or vice-rector after report from one or more professors, and they are then discussed publicly by the faculty and the candidate (_soutenance de thèse_). In this public discussion the "disputation" of the middle ages survives in its least changed form. The literary theses required by French universities are, as a rule, volumes of several hundred pages, and more important in character even than the German _Habilitationsschrift_. The possession of the doctorate is a _sine qua non_ for eligibility to a university chair, and to a lectureship in the university of Paris.