Ten-year man
From Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core
A ten-year man was a category of mature student at the University of Cambridge.
Under the University's statutes of 1570, a man over twenty-four could proceed to a BD degree ten years after matriculation without first gaining a BA degree or a MA degree. The device was not used much until the nineteenth century. It was abolished in the mid-nineteenth-century university reforms, after criticism that it had become a route to a Cambridge degree which required no formal test of the man's ability.[1]
