Original sentence: Consisting until recently of 11 or 12 three-hour papers set across seven consecutive days, the final examination at the end of the course was notoriously intensive; this is no longer the case thanks to the wide-ranging redesign of the way Classics is taught at Oxford, necessitated by the omission of Latin and Greek from the British National Curriculum when it was introduced in 1988.The formerly optional prose and verse composition papers (English into Latin and Greek) have been removed from the Greats syllabus entirely
Edited sentence: Consisting until recently of 11 or 12 three-hour papers set across seven consecutive days, the "Mods" examination at the end of the fifth term was notoriously intensive (in terms of quantity of examinations, even more so than the final examinations at the end of the twelfth term).The formerly optional prose and verse composition papers (English into Latin and Greek) have been removed from the Greats syllabus entirely, but are still not uncommonly taken at Mods.This entails an intensive two-term language course in the first year, which is designed to bring comparative beginners up to the level of the Greats course.This is still to some extent the case, though changes have been made thanks to the wide-ranging redesign of the way Classics is taught at Oxford, necessitated by the omission of Latin and Greek from the British National Curriculum when it was introduced in 1988