The Troubled Tripos is again being changed.

At the same time the university is spinning archaeology off into its own Tripos – an admission that the discipline’s “visibility” had suffered significantly as a result of the HSPS merger – the university is taking the radical decision to create two true joint honours courses in Oxford style in History and Politics and History and Modern Languages.

It says a great deal about the endurance of the tripos system that the idea of introducing two true joint honours courses seems so unusual. After all, the system is sold to prospective students as offering unparalleled opportunities to study a subject broadly before specialising in later years. Why apply for an early modern history course when you can apply to Cambridge’s broader History Tripos and be exposed to other periods that may capture your interest more than you could have imagined?

The trouble with this approach is that for traditional disciplines like history, classics and languages, the triposes are based around the faculties that house them, stymieing the possibility of interaction apart from the rare borrowed papers in final years about which prospective students know very little. Did you know, for example, that it is already possible to combine an MML degree with a classical language from the Classics Tripos, effectively giving a joint honours course, and that this has been possible for decades?

Many don’t, including many potentially interested prospective students, because the option is only available as part of the MML Tripos. Hence the degree that students graduate with following this path is MML. Unfortunately, such students also lose their privileges to choose any combination of final-year papers from Classics, effectively forcing second-years to choose whether to follow MML or Classics near exclusively.

Hardly a joint honours system for those students who would like to maintain their interests in both disciplines, and hardly reflective of the course path they have followed in their first two years.

Make no mistake: the courses are a clear admission of increasing competition from Oxford and UCL, among other institutions. Even if the tripos system offers some of the broadest arts degrees in the country, joint honours offer a potential way to maintain that flexibility while also making it far clearer to prospective students precisely what course they will be studying.

Indeed, the news History and Politics Tripos could negatively impact on its closest similar subject, HSPS. Given that problems with this course regarding its visibility and its course options have been apparent since its inception, the introduction of a far clearer course that will undoubtedly appeal to a significant number of potential HSPS applicants could have a further effect on numbers for the latter course.

Time will tell whether the effects on applications are so severe as to warrant yet another change to HSPS, rapidly becoming the Troubled Tripos.