After you join the bards' college, you can talk to the history teacher and show your interest in history. You can buy history books from him, and take exams on the contents of those books, and if you get a passing grade you're rewarded with Speech XP. All the interactions are voiced by AI (Tortoise TTS). The books are grouped into three "tiers", the books get progressively more difficult and are unlocked when you pass all the exams in the previous tier and have sufficient Speech skill (50 for tier 2, 75 for tier 3). Currently there's 36 total exams you can take.

Note that the amount of XP is balanced around both your Speech level and the tier of book, so you might not always see the "Speech increased" message. At higher levels you need two or three exams to get one Speech level.

Compatibility
Everything. Edits to only one vanilla record for the bard college cell. Load this mod before any mods that alters the Bards College interior (like Lux). Also compatible with Skyrim Souls RE to unpause the game during the exam.
Patch for Requiem 3BFTweaks is available at that mod's page. You get Insight potions as reward.
File is ESP-FE (with ESL flag) so it does not take a slot in your load order.

Changelogs
= 1.0.1=
* Fixed an incorrect question in the Orsinium exam
* All script names are prefixed, fixing compatibility with other mods
* Duck.

Thank you
Huge thank you to JaySerpa, for his suggestions on how to improve the mod, and more importantly words of encouragement without which this mod would not have seen the light of day.