iPedia Free Information Center

Information about Comprehensive Examination

This article or section may deal primarily with the U.S. and may not present a worldwide view.
A comprehensive examination (or comprehensive exam or exams), often abbreviated as "comps," is a specific type of examination that must be completed by graduate students in some disciplines and courses of study. At some institutions it is known as a preliminary examination and abbreviated as "prelims."

The form and general requirements for the comprehensive exam varies according to the faculty or department, degree sought, university, and country, but typically tests knowledge of the student's subject area and two or more related areas, and may be used to determine a candidate's eligibility to continue his or her course of study. Typically, comprehensive exams consist of three written exams and an oral examination.

In some university departments, graduate students seeking a Ph.D. degree must take a series of written cumulative examinations on the subject of their study in the first year or two of the Ph.D. program. These cumulative exams are often given on a pass/fail basis and a graduate student who seeks to continue in the Ph.D. program must pass a minimum number of these cumulative exams. After this minimum number of cumulative exams is passed, this degree requirement is considered to be met, and the Ph.D. student no longer takes these exams but continues work on other Ph.D. requirements.

Comprehensive examinations are typically based on a reading list agreed upon by the student and his or her committee, which is staffed by the primary supervisor and several advisors, normally professors at the university, but not necessarily in the same faculty. This reading list may comprise dozens or hundreds of books and other works.

The student must make him- or herself thoroughly familiar with the works on the reading list; in the examination, which often lasts two or more hours and during which the student may usually not consult any texts, the student must refer to the works on the reading list by author and title.

Canada

Ph.D. students at Canadian universities must complete their comprehensive exams by the end of their second year; those who fail to pass with a sufficiently high mark may retake the examination only once. Failure to pass a second time will normally result in expulsion from the program. Students who pass are distinguished with the title "Ph.D. candidate."

United States

In some US graduate programs, particularly in the natural sciences, the majority of students do not have master's degrees when they begin graduate work, and the successful students will earn doctorates without getting master's degrees on the way. In these programs, a student who does not pass "comps" or "prelims" on the second try will generally be allowed to earn a terminal master's degree but not permitted to become a candidate for a doctoral degree. Technically, at many institutions being formally accepted as a candidate for the Ph.D. automatically entitles the student to a Master of Arts degree, but few students actually bother submitting the paperwork to apply for the MA degree after passing prelims. Comprehensive examinations of this type are more common in the sciences and some social sciences, and relatively unknown in most humanities disciplines.

In the second and third years of study, doctoral programs often require students to pass more examinations. Programs often require a Qualifying Examination ("Quals") or General Examination ("Generals") or Comprehensive Examinations (again, "Comps"), testing students' grasp of a broad sample of their discipline, and/or one or several Special Field Examinations ("Specials"), testing students in their narrower selected areas of specialty within the discipline. If these examinations are held orally, they may be known colloquially as "orals". For some social science and many humanities disciplines, where graduate students may or may not have studied the discipline at the undergraduate level, these exams will be the first set, and be based either on graduate coursework or specific preparatory reading (sometimes up to a year's work in reading). In all cases, comprehensive exams are normally both stressful and time consuming, and must be passed to be allowed to proceed on to the thesis. Passing such examinations allows the student to stay, begin doctoral research, and rise to the status of a doctoral candidate, while failing usually results in the student leaving the program or re-taking the test after some time has passed (usually a semester or a year). Some schools have an intermediate category, passing at the master's level, which allows the student to leave with a master's without having completed a master's thesis.

See also

References

Motto
"In God We Trust"   (since 1956)
"E Pluribus Unum"   ("From Many, One"; Latin, traditional)
Anthem
..... Click the link for more information.
To examine somebody or something is to inspect it closely, hence an examination is a detailed inspection or analysis of an object or person.

In an academic or professional context, examinations (or exams
..... Click the link for more information.
Postgraduate education (often known in North America as graduate education, and sometimes described as quaternary education) involves studying for degrees or other qualifications for which a first or Bachelor's degree is required, and is normally considered to be part
..... Click the link for more information.
Prelims (preliminary examinations) are a first set of examinations at Oxford University, normally during the first half of the degree course for some courses. They do not have a class associated with them, unlike Honour Moderations.
..... Click the link for more information.
A faculty is a division within a university. The medieval University of Paris, which served as a model for most of the later medieval universities in Europe, had four faculties: the Faculties of Theology, Law, Medicine, and finally the Faculty of Arts, which every student had to
..... Click the link for more information.
A degree is any of a wide range of status levels conferred by institutions of higher education, such as universities, normally as the result of successfully completing a program of study.
..... Click the link for more information.
university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees at all levels (bachelor, master, and doctorate) in a variety of subjects. A university provides both tertiary and quaternary education.
..... Click the link for more information.
In political geography and international politics, a country is a political division of a geographical entity, a sovereign territory, most commonly associated with the notions of state or nation and government.
..... Click the link for more information.
worldwide view of the subject.
Please [ improve this article] or discuss the issue on the talk page.
"Ph.D." redirects here, for other uses see Ph.D. (disambiguation).


Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated Ph.D.
..... Click the link for more information.
final examination (or final exam) is a test given to students at the end of a course of study or training. Although the term can be used in the context of physical training, it most often occurs in the academic world.
..... Click the link for more information.
Assessment is the process of documenting, usually in measurable terms, knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs. This article covers educational assessment including the work of institutional researchers, but the term applies to other fields as well including health and finance.
..... Click the link for more information.


This article is copied from an article on Wikipedia.org - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. The text was not checked or edited by anyone on our staff. Although the vast majority of the wikipedia encyclopedia articles provide accurate and timely information please do not assume the accuracy of any particular article. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.
Herod_Archelaus


page counter