June 2022

The Qualifying Exam

Or preliminary exam or prelim or A-exam or or or…

Every PhD program has a number of requirements you must fulfill to earn your doctorate. While coursework should seem straightforward and you’ve no doubt interacted with TA’s (or taught already), there is one facet of the PhD program that has an unusually high level of ambiguity.

The qualifying exam(s).

See? I even had to put parentheses to cover for a plural because language and structure around this milestone are so inconsistent. The qualifying exam comes at a pivotal moment in the PhD experience. You will be formally transitioning out of a more familiar, structured student experience into an unstructured, self-led experience.

That’s pretty scary.

So, What is a “Qualifying Exam”

Let’s start from the top: what is the point of a PhD?

There are obviously infinite answers to this question, but a simple, and mostly right, answer is that when you achieve a PhD you are an expert on in your subfield. You will be one of a handful of people who have the skills and knowledge to conduct your specific research.

In order to accomplish this you need to know a lot of stuff.

• • Know your discipline. Each discipline has its own history. Information science, for instance, comes from two distinct lineages. First, library and information studies. With the advent of computational tools, the work of critically engaging with knowledge production, documentation, and organization now has a computational component. Second, computer science. The overwhelming hegemony of computer science as a field and industry has backtracked and began funding work on the social components of technical systems and processes. You can see in both cases how a field like information science would emerge. However, the histories heavily influence who your “canon” are, what research is supported, and what values your department leads with.
  • Know how to publish in your field. A vanilla description of the research process is as follows: literature review -> research questions -> methodology -> data collection -> analysis -> submit. You should have participated in each aspect of this process. Importantly, you should be able to critique and justify decisions made in this process. You don’t have to be an expert in every method, but you should understand why qualitative methods exist, even if you don’t use them.
  • Know your domain. Historic theories, disciplinary milestones, methods, and, of course, the cutting edge research today. You should know the names of the handful of people who are doing the work you aspire to and you should know who inspires them. How else can you claim to be an expert who is crafting novel studies?

When you ascend to candidacy, you will be working on a body of knowledge that is highly-specific to you. You need a myriad of formal and informal skills to allow you to successfully write, present, and defend your dissertation. This is how departments have decided to assess whether you are ready for that step.

What do you do in a Qualifying Exam?

That’s a great question and one I didn’t know the answer to until roughly six months before I scheduled my qualifying exam.

A note on logistics: Qualifying exam(s) typically take place over the course of one semester. You are assigned your tasks at the beginning, conduct the work in the middle, and schedule your “exam” for the end. Usually, this involves a presentation and Q&A open to the public, a private Q&A with only the committee and student, and finally a closed doors deliberation amongst only the committee members to make a decision.

So what are those tasks?

There are varying levels of structure depending on the institution and department. Here are a few broad archetypes:

• • Traditional: You are assigned a list of books and articles. You must read, synthesize, and write essays based on prompts provided by your committee. The deliverable can be written or oral. In rare cases, you have to write the essays under the supervision of your committee like a standard exam.
  • Hybrid: Typically holds onto the structure of a traditional model with more flexibility on the activities available.
  • Flexible: Anything is on the table for assessing your progress. Writing a grant, a research paper (in progress or published), a course syllabus, fellowship, literature review, a teaching statement, an advising statement, or whatever! Format for demonstrating your knowledge is also open to you/your committees discretion.

Here is what my qualifying exam looks like and why they are these topics:

• • Course syllabus on online communities and a teaching statement. One of the career paths I am strongly considering is a tenure track position at a small liberal arts college. This means that teaching is highly valued, so having a teaching statement and draft syllabus of a course, I am uniquely positioned to teach, is a strategic and useful task.
  • Essay on theories of social norms (both IRL and online). This task came from two places. First, I lack a strong theoretical foundation. I don’t have a masters and I worked as an applied researcher before grad school. Second, I have been talking about social norms being a part of my research agenda, but hadn’t done anything with it in my research. So, it was an opportunity to force myself to learn these theories.
  • Lead author published paper. There are few examples that you are ready to be a scholar than leading a research project from research design to submission.

In an ideal world, your qualifying exam tasks you with exactly what you need to feel confident and competent moving forward to dissertation work. If you don’t know what those tasks would be, begin that conversation with your committee. If you already know, use whatever tools you have to advocate for their inclusion in the exam.

Can you fail the exam?

Yep.

But do students fail the exam? Hardly ever.

It’s not a good look for anyone if a student fails. When failure does happen it is likely from departmental politics, a malicious committee member, or a traumatic experience happening to the student.

Now that that’s out of the way, there is a pretty standard evaluation scale for your qualifying exam:

• • Pass Nothing else required, congratulations!
  • Conditional Pass You pass, but you may have to revise or add to what you submitted. This may involve presenting again.
  • Fail What happens next varies depending on the institution, so ask the question to your committee.

I want to make this point clear: no humane committee places you in a position to fail your qualifying exam. So, if you have a humane committee: trust the process, advocate for yourself, and try to have some fun with it!

Final Thoughts

Hopefully this post helped answer the questions of what a qualifying exam is, why we have them, and what some can look like. As a first-gen college student, I had no idea what to expect from the qualifying exam and still have a lot of questions of what life after will be like.

What I have learned in this process is that part of being a PhD student is trusting in your committee to practice some informed clairvoyance. They know to a much greater extent what is required to succeed in a PhD program, so you have to trust that they are working in your best interest.