What Were Your Comprehensive Exams Like?

[spork]

I've become an external reader/examiner for a doctoral program with an online pathway. My role is to be one of the people who marks the comprehensive exams of students if they've taken courses in a subject area with which I'm familiar. Turns out everyone takes the exams remotely and is given a four-hour time block during which they are on camera (I guess this is monitored by an exam proctoring service). Students are not allowed any books, notes, or other reference materials. They are allowed a blank pad of paper to write notes to help organize their answers to questions while taking the exam.

I discovered the above information after I received my first batch of exams to mark and found them to be far less "comprehensive" than I think the term "comprehensive exam" ought to indicate. No citations to noted works in the field -- ok, they didn't have source material at hand. But no discussion of relevant theory or theorists. Arguments often not organized well. I was writing better responses in timed essay exams as an undergraduate. 

I think the low quality of what I was reading was caused at least partially by the format of the exam. For my own comprehensive exams, I received two questions from each of my five dissertation committee members, had to choose one question from each member, and had to submit all of my responses within a five-day deadline. It was all open book. I realize there are concerns about cheating when it comes to online exams, but I want to recommend that this program change how it does things and I need examples. How were your exams organized? 

[polly_mer]

At a prestigious chemical engineering program, we wrote three full days of problem sets in a proctored room with only the reference material provided.

At an unranked-due-to-having-too-few-doctoral-graduates materials engineering program, I spent a semester on an original library research project that resulted in a publishable paper that was defended publicly.  The point was to address a known extensive conflict in the literature.

[Parasaurolophus]

We didn't have any. Instead, we had a master's length research paper to write.

My friends and acquaintances mostly describe their comps the way you did yours, however.

[Morden]

My English comprehensive exams were timed (3 hours each) with no reference material allowed and no idea of the specific questions ahead of time. There were three on consecutive days: one about the dissertation topic, one about the context surrounding that topic, and one about the dissertation topic in broader context. But in each case, we were expected to refer to specific authors, theories, and texts; we just didn't have the texts with us. I had read material for about a year preparing for them.

[glowdart]

In the olden days before the internet, we had a four part exam structure before you could move to candidacy:

There were multiple 2-hour oral exams spread over the fourth & fifth semester of PhD coursework. We still had to refer to theorists and ideas, as well as being able to compare arguments and approaches to content.

The written exam was like yours in some ways, but we had the questions for two weeks, I think. We could bring notes, and we then had to write together while being timed & proctored, semester six. (Again, pre-internet. Eventually the department got a computer lab which was commandeered for the written exam day and people could choose to type or write long-hand.)

And, depending on your focus areas, there were exams to pass those areas - but the format and structure of those varied quite a bit, as did the timing. I did one of mine in my first semester and the other during the orals year. I was scheduled to do a third but dropped it and pulled that content out of my dissertation project. Some were written, some were oral, a couple were practical. Some were required for candidacy, some were optional, and some were "optional."

And then you had one final oral where you had to write a dossier in advance and then justify why having passed all of these other exams was sufficient - the oral defense of your application to candidacy. This usually happened semester six/seven, but this is where the lack of structured scheduling and the fuzziness of the focus area exams caused people to delay.

There was some kind of schedule for what to do if you failed any part of these, but I don't remember the details. And, people failed.


A friend in a different program at the same school had our structure but written exams all the way through until the dossier presentation & oral defense of your application to candidacy. Otherwise the structure and timing was the same. Her focus area schedule was firmer, too.

Another friend's department just did a single week of written exams - four days of shared content and a fifth on your focus areas - sometimes a sixth on Saturday if you had multiple focus areas, with one giant oral defense of all later that month — and then the candidacy dossier & oral the next semester.

[mamselle]

I was doing an interactive arts independent study program. My comps (negotiated and approved by the department) were:

1) An annotated bibliography of 30 pages with at least 250 entries (I was adding to the one I compiled for my MA, which was accepted as my baseline), a preface on the philosophy of work, and a lit. review summary in the Introduction. This was reviewed with a fine-tooth comb by an English lit professor with knowledge of my liturgical studies fields, who wrote on topics in religion and philosophy . I still work from and add to that listing; it was later picked up by a liturgical arts website on danced worship and published online.

2) A two-part slide-lecture-plus-position-paper sequence (not uncommon in art history studies, at least then) on American colonial church art and architecture. Three churches were to be chosen, addressing their construction, stylistic derivations, and use as sites of communal theatre. I chose one early SW Spanish RC mission church, a VA Anglican building, and a NE Congregational meetinghouse, developing comparisons between them. The slide lecture (to my readers as audience) was a general survey, the paper developed the comparisons. I'm still developing materials discovered during that research, have led tours and published papers based on those findings, and proposed a summer study program (that was never adopted).

3) A combination dance and music history/choreography project (dance was also taken to be one of my languages (French and Latin being the others) and this was counted towards that as well. This was set to a long (6-min.) classical piece, and overseen by the dance reader on my team, incorporated into a regular Sunday service as a sermon, with further oversight by the cathedral clergy, and a position statement on the musicological and choreographic background of the work that accompanied the piece that was also developed further for the examining committee.

(4) I was also supposed to have done a study of liturgical Office processions in 13th c. France, but it was not possible to get the reader for that topic at the time. It would have been a research paper on the assigned topic, with an oral review to follow. It was decided that the other three comps were enough; I folded much of the processions work into the thesis and have also continued to work on topics that arose in that study...three articles on my desk right now are based on them. (I still wish the comps itself could have been done, it would have been great to have worked with that individual.)

I realize these don't quite match the usual paradigms for programs in either the humanities or the sciences, exactly, but they were rigorously graded, they established the competencies needed to research and write my thesis, and I found them useful in my work going forward.

M.

[sinenomine]

My comps (comparative literature) were four, 4-hour long written exams, with reading lists for each topic area — national literature, time period, genre, and theory — set in advance with my committee. It was long enough ago that we had the option of handwritten or word processor; I opted for handwritten (I don't think my penmanship has ever recovered!).

The candidacy exam in my department was comprised of a pre-written portion discussing a possible research path and an oral portion, analyzing and discussing an unfamiliar text in a foreign language.

[Caracal]

Mine was more like Spork's. For each field, we got a question and then had twenty four hours to turn it in. If I recall correctly, we were told we should only actually be doing work for 8 of those hours or something. It was all open note and open book.

[namazu]

At what point in the program do they take these comprehensive exams, and are there other exams (e.g. orals / quals / whatever they might be called locally) they must also pass?

In my doctoral program (usually ranked top-3), in a science field where few people had formal training at the undergraduate level and people entered the program with a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds,  the comprehensive exams were given at the end of the first year of coursework.  They were spread over two days. 

The first day consisted of a multiple choice/short answer/short-essay exams that covered basic factual knowledge, applied problem-solving, interpretation of analysis results, limited theory, and history of the field.  It was closed-book/closed-note, though some formulas may have been provided (and others required memorization).  Roughly 4 hours long.

They sent us home that night with 1-2 papers to read, depending on what track we were in, and the following day we had to discuss/evaluate the paper(s), given certain prompts/questions.  Again, ~4 hours long, written. 

Each part (day 1 vs. day 2) was graded separately and both had to be passed to continue in the program.  However, comps were not what allowed us to advance to candidacy, and most of us did not yet have dissertation committees at the time we took our comps. 

We also had to present a public defense of our written dissertation proposals in our 2nd-3rd year.  After that, we had a set of two separate oral exams, with two separate committees of different compositions, one at the departmental level, and another at the school level.

[spork]

At what point in the program do they take these comprehensive exams, and are there other exams (e.g. orals / quals / whatever they might be called locally) they must also pass?

[. . . ]

These are the only exams, taken after course work has been completed and a dissertation proposal has been reviewed and approved by members of the student's dissertation committee. No prelims, quals, or anything else of that nature. The exams are not targeted at the dissertation topic, but are supposed to demonstrate knowledge of a couple of sub-areas within the general field (students have a limited menu of sub-areas from which to choose from -- exam questions are tailored to the chosen sub-areas).

This is a doctoral program that is not designed to produce future professors. I went through a traditionally-organized program and I've had a multi-decade career in academia. I might be using standards that are based on my own background. But I'm dismayed by the overall quality of the exams I've seen. 

[eigen]

We did cumulative exams instead of comprehensive exams. Once a month, one faculty member in each subdiscipline would write an exam. Random rotation.

You had 3 hours to take as many of them as you could.

You had 2 years to pass X exams within your subdiscipline in addition to Y exams outside of it.

The topics, question length and complexity and everything else were reasonably random.

[Aster]

Each of my dissertation committee members individually submitted a series of take-home questions for me to answer. I had about a two week window to complete them all.

The next month, there was a formal, closed-door meeting where I was parked in front of a chalkboard and barraged with a bunch of oral questions from the committee.

All in all, my prelims were surprisingly light. The dissertation defense was far tougher.

[mamselle]

This is a doctoral program that is not designed to produce future professors.

...Hunh?

I mean, I guess research scientists may or may not have to be professorial, I've worked for those folks, but any of them COULD have led a course with very decent standards, without much difficulty.

And researchers more generally may not have to be able to teach, but....

...But, in the larger sense....

   What's a Ph.D for if not to create folks who at least could be future professors?

   <<...scratches head, walks away, puzzled...>>

M.

[spork]

This is a doctoral program that is not designed to produce future professors.

...Hunh?

I mean, I guess research scientists may or may not have to be professorial, I've worked for those folks, but any of them COULD have led a course with very decent standards, without much difficulty.

And researchers more generally may not have to be able to teach, but....

...But, in the larger sense....

   What's a Ph.D for if not to create folks who at least could be future professors?

   <<...scratches head, walks away, puzzled...>>

M.

Credential for career advancement. E.g., K-12 school systems, the military.

[mamselle]

Oops, reading fail on my part.

You didn't say "Ph.D.," you said "doctoral," meaning that could include Ed.D's, Th.D's, etc.

Got it, sorry!

M.