The Qualifying Exam: The Earlier the Better?

Ben Franklin famously declared that two things in life were guaranteed – death and taxes.  For scientists, Ben may have updated it to “death, taxes and the qualifying exam.”  Although graduate programs vary with regard to degree requirements, the qualifying exam seems to be one hurdle they’ve all agreed to include.

In most places, the qualifying exam requires a student to defend their proposed dissertation project in front of a panel of experts.  In theory, the test helps students think through their project before blindly diving in.  Of course, proposing a bunch of experiments with little data leaves a student vulnerable to the endless barrage of “what if” questions that could spell disaster in the exam.  While some institutions required that the qualifier be taken by a certain date, many of these rules went unenforced for years.  Of course, being data-driven people, students realized that it was much easier to defend a project that was 90% complete, as opposed to 9%.

As a result, it was not uncommon for students to wait until their fourth or fifth years to take their qualifying exams.  While committees may claim that they expect more out of a fourth or fifth year graduate student in a qualifier, it’s hard to argue with a project that’s essentially completed.  The real problem arises when students don’t get the appropriate guidance early on and are allowed to flounder for years.

In the recent past, as time-to-graduation statistics crept up, many programs began implementing stricter standards regarding the qualifying exam.  Departments hoped that by moving up the exam, many of the major time-wasting bugs would be ironed out of projects (and students) earlier.  While the move certainly makes sense from a fundamental standpoint, the first challenge is to actually get students to start taking the exam earlier.  So we want to know at what point in your graduate career did you take your qualifying exam?

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