Grad School Diaries: The Qualifying Exam

The Qualifying Exam.

Its mere mention is enough to make a grad student break out in a cold sweat. At least it had that effect on me, up until I successfully completed mine.

For me, the worst part was that I didn’t know what to expect. The “Qualifying Exam” was this big, black box that swallowed stressed-out, twitchy grad students and which spat PhD Candidates out the other side. I’d heard a few of the legends(?) of students failing and being asked to remove themselves from the PhD program, and of course endured the teasing from other grad students & faculty about the terrors that were about to befall me, the poor, naive grad student, but I didn’t have any real sense as to what I was about to undertake, or more importantly, what expectations there were. With that in mind, I figured I’d open up and share my experiences from start to finish so anyone who might be considering doing a PhD, or anyone who is just curious, can go into it with some sense of what to expect. Just remember that every school & department does things differently from what I can tell, so be sure to consult with your (prospective) department and remember that while some of the things I’ll be discussing are probably broadly relevant, the specifics or processes will likely be different.

So, what is a Qualifying Exam, and why must one take it? From my department’s graduate student handbook:

The Qualifying Examination provides an opportunity to ensure that students have acquired an in-depth understanding on their area of research and in the broader aspects of scientific research and knowledge. For faculty, the Qualifying Examination provides an opportunity to assess the student’s breadth and depth of understanding of the subject area and related fields, technical competence, analytical skills, capacity for critical thinking and to identify a student’s weaknesses that can be addressed within our graduate program. As the name implies, upon successful completion of the Qualifying Examination, a student qualifies for the status of PhD Candidate. Thus, the Qualifying Examination allows the School to determine if a student is ready to progress to the dissertation stage of the doctoral degree.

Yep, that’s clear as mud now. Think of it as a delayed entrance exam to prove that you’re really are as smart as your grades/references say you are. But, how does it work?

In my department, the exam is administered by 4 faculty members plus a committee chair whose job it is to organize the actual exam and keep things moving. The student’s advisory committee (the people who directly mentor your thesis and provide guidance on projects & progress over the entire course of your degree) suggest 4 topics that are somewhat related to your thesis research, and then assign one of those topics to each of your exam committee members. For my exam, we settled on “Philosophy of Science”, “Evolution”, “Taxonomy & Systematics”, and “Entomology” as the four topics, and then assigned each topic to a faculty member who had agreed to serve on my exam committee. Since each of those topics are conspicuously broad, I met with each of my examiners to discuss the general areas they would most likely be questioning me on (note that just because they say one thing doesn’t mean they can’t ask about something else under their topic’s umbrella), and to see if there were any books or papers they would recommend. From there I went off and started reading everything I could get my hands on to prepare for the examinations.

The examination itself was broken down into two parts, a written component, and assuming you pass that stage, an oral exam a few weeks later. The written exam is broken up into 4 segments (one for each examiner’s question), each 2 hours long over the course of two days (2 hours in the morning, 2 hours in the afternoon for 2 consecutive days) and with a varying availability of references and aides depending on the examiner’s preference. I wrote my exam on a Thursday and Friday, by myself in a locked room. One of my examiners allowed me to bring in a text book I’d been using to study, while the other 3 were entirely closed book. I was provided a laptop that couldn’t connect to the internet and a few booklets of paper to organize my thoughts or draw diagrams on if I needed to. After 2 hours, the graduate secretary would come and collect my work (saved on a USB stick), and I’d go and out and stare blankly into the distance for a bit before quickly reviewing my next subject. If at least 3 of the 4 examiners considered my written answers acceptable, then the oral exam would take place 2 weeks later. The oral exam is restricted to department faculty (so other students aren’t able to sit in and learn what happens in these exams first hand) and the 4 examiners & the committee chair are given the opportunity to dive deeper into their topics (but are not restricted from interceding and asking questions about topics assigned to another examiner) with a specified time constraint (20 minutes each in the first round of questioning, 10-15 minutes in the second round).

Personally, I was more worried about the written exam than the oral as I generally feel more confident in my ability to talk my way through problems and out of trouble than I do being forced to write something intelligent & cohesive in limited amount of time.

To prepare, my department recommends students devote a term (2-4 months) to studying, but due to a variety of factors, I ended up with a month from setting my topics to writing the exam. You can see what I ended up reading in the photo at the top of the page (I read almost half of them cover-to-cover, while the others I only read the sections that I thought would be relevant to my exam), and then supplemented those texts with a few dozen papers that provided more depth & detail. The heavy presence of social insect literature was because my “Evolution” examiner was particularly interested in kin selection and the evolution of eusociality, a topic which I had pretty much no experience with going into this. Lesson #1: don’t become so focused on studying the things you’re worried about that you forget to review the other topics your examiner brought up…

So, how did it go? For the most part, a lot better than I had been worried it would. I had correctly predicted what my examiners were going to ask me for 3 out of the 4 questions, and ended up writing answers that I left feeling (mostly) happy and confident with. If you’re interested and have nothing better to do than read 5,000 hastily written words, you can read them all here. Each answer is exactly as I submitted them, including all the annoying spelling & grammar mistakes which I failed to catch at the time. Lesson #2: proof-reading your own work on a tight timeline and in a stressful situation is not ideal.

As for the “Evolution” exam, well, it caught me well and truly off-guard. Like I said, I became so focused on learning about kin selection and the evolution of eusociality (trying to understand the mathematical derivation of Hamilton’s Rule; why E.O. Wilson et al. disagree with kin selection and the debate over its role; the evolutionary history and natural history of Hymenoptera that has resulted in eusociality being so successful and frequently evolved), that I forgot to study, or even review, the basics of evolution & speciation, a subject my examiner had briefly mentioned in our meeting. To say that I panicked would be an understatement. I lost nearly 20 minutes to blank-minded staring at the ceiling trying to dig into the deepest recesses of my brain in order to answer the question, or at least bullshit my way around it enough to scrounge a pass. While my answer wasn’t perfect, it also wasn’t total garbage, which is a result I’ll gladly take given the circumstances!

After all was said and done, I was notified that I had passed the written section, and that my oral exam would proceed as planned in a week and a half. Between the written and the oral exams I brushed up on the details that I had been shaky on or flat-out wrong about, and then took the weekend off prior to my exam on Monday afternoon. The oral exam itself wasn’t exactly what I had expected, with a much higher proportion of the time spent rehashing answers I had given in the written exam than I would have guessed (and not just picking out the flaws, but literally me retelling the things I had written down). My examiners did question me on a few other topics that weren’t covered in the written portion, but other than a few mental glitches on my behalf, things went smoothly and it was actually a fairly enjoyable 2.5 hour conversation. Not necessarily one I’d want to do again mind you, but certainly not the tortuous experience that I had stressed over.

And just like that, I became a PhD Candidate! Huzzah!

Before going through it, I didn’t understand the point of the Qualifying Exam, or why students are still required to do it in the age of the internet, digital reference management software and an abundance of specialized, potential collaborators. I’ll admit, part of this attitude was fuelled by ego, and part of it was denial and trepidation over being forced to face this unknown and scary challenge. Now that I’m on the other side looking back, I can appreciate why it’s still a core requirement (although I still think those things about the internet, digitization & collaborations still hold true to a certain extent). If nothing else, it forced me to sit down and read a lot of the books and papers that I’ve been meaning to read for weeks/months/years, but continually putting off to do more immediate things, like collect new data, write papers, and read Twitter. Being forced to put all those other responsibilities aside for a month and just concentrate on learning for learning’s sake was a lot of fun and incredibly useful (even if it required a looming, stressful exam at the tail end). I find a lot of the ideas I’ve had swimming around in my head are more focused and stronger now that I have a better understanding of the field, and I’ve been able to reexamine aspects of my work I thought I understood with greater clarity and a new light.

What’s more, I gained a new confidence in my ability to write and produce academic content, even under stressful conditions. This is something that I’ve struggled with for a long time, but it was very reassuring to produce several pieces of writing which I was proud of and to do so in a timely manner.

So that’s my Qualifying Exam experience. I can’t guarantee yours will be anything like this, but if you decide to pursue a PhD and are preparing for your own Qualifying Exam experience, I hope this gives you an idea of what to expect, and perhaps some things to avoid in the process.

If you’ve gone through the Qualifying Exam procedure, and have other tips or stories to tell, please feel free to share them below in the comments. Misery loves company, and it’s always interesting to hear how different institutions approach similar problems, or how expectations and procedures have changed with time.