PhD Qualifying Exams: Are they rigged and/or biased?

Graduate School
1

<p>I’m a MS student in Mechanical Engineering at a top university. Since funding was extended on my project, I’ve decided to go for the PhD. </p>

<p>Consequently I now must take “the quals” this semester, an exam I know nothing about. At this program, it is an oral exam, and I know more than a few students who failed. </p>

<p>Also, I’m not naive to what I’m sure goes on behind closed doors. I’m sure the high-end, tenure-track profs have biases, and selectively/arbitrarily pick which students fail, and which students pass (regardless of their actual performance on the exam). </p>

<p>This is very concerning to me, as I’m not well liked by many of the profs that administer the exam. This is a fact that is pretty well known throughout the department. Obviously as a departing MS student I didn’t care about this fact. Furthermore, due to many personal factors, my research has been lacking in the passed 3-4 months.
Also, I know my subject area (very) well. Most likely, I will do well on the exam … if I’m asked fair questions</p>

<p>I have the following questions:</p>

<p>1) Are these “quals” exams actually administered in a fair way? It seems like the dept is allowed to ask any arbitrary question on the subject (easy or hard), and in the end arbitrarily decide if the student fails.</p>

<p>2) What can I do (if anything) to set the bias in my favor at this late date?</p>

<p>3) If these exams have no bounds, wouldn’t a prof ask easys questions to students he/she likes, and impossibly hasd questions to students he/she dislikes? What’s stopping then from doing that?
4) Is it pointless to take the exams if I have made a negative impression on a few important tenure profs?</p>

<p>5) In general, is it common prectice to arbitrarily fail students, regardless of their performance/competency? Or, equvilantly, is it common to “stack-the-deck” against certain students by asking near-impossible questions?</p>

<p>Admittedly, I have no experience with doctorates. But this “quals” exam seems as rigged as a casino. In general, my main question is:</p>

<p>How do I know this exam is not political/rigged, and that I’m not wasting my time by studying 3-4 months?</p>

2

<p>In my experience, qualifying exams are not rigged. They are given to ensure that students have a broad knowledge of the field. In my department we want every Ph.D. candidate to pass the qualifiers and if there are M.S. students who pass it at the Ph.D. level, we encourage them to stay for a Ph.D. Admittedly, our exam, like many other physics qualifiers is written and encompasses two 4 hour exams over 2 days. When deciding who passes and who fails, we take into account the student’s research progress and other factors besides just the raw score on the exam.</p>

<p>It is possible that in your department the exam is more confrontational than this but I have a hard time seeing why there is any motivation to deliberately fail students unless, there are just not enough research positions for the number of students in the program. In physics this used to be the case in the days when I was in graduate school but I don’t think many departments have this kind of attitude any longer.</p>

3

<p>Stressed…this is a bit of a strange post. What I’m surprised at is that you don’t mention your relationship with your advisor once. Sure,Oral engineering quals can be rigged. My quals were at a 10 ten engineering school and where oral. The thing is that if they are going to be rigged, the are going to be rigged based on your advisor who is funding you. If your advisor is well liked, has tenure, and wants you to pass, this helps a lot.</p>

<p>You have the grades to take quals, and your project’s funding got extended. Your advisor should be happy. Again, what is your relationship with your advisor? Does he/she want you in the PhD program?</p>

4

<p>

Generally yes, they are fair. Not easy, not fun, but fair. Many departments use a “test to destruction” method in quals, which can make you feel like you failed even if you pass muster. You can always ask the department about their pass rate - many are willing to tell you.</p>

<p>

Study. And make sure your advisor is willing to go to bat for you - in many cases, they defer the final decision until they talk to your advisor and get their opinion of you.</p>

<p>

First, it is a panel not a single prof in part to counter this possibility. Second, what did you to engender such enmity??</p>

<p>

No. You don’t seem to understand the politics and procedures of academia, but it would take truly exceptional distaste for a professor to push hard enough against an unliked but competent student to get them booted. They would have to dislike you enough to not only act unprofessionally but to somehow push the rest of the department or committee into going along. That is an exceptionally rare level of anger.</p>

<p>

No, it is rare enough to be a matter of myth.</p>

5

<p>I agree with Cosmicfish…in part…for a qual committee to fail a competent student with his advisor’s support is something I’ve never heard of anywhere.</p>

<p>I have heard of “rigging” in the sense that you go into quals without your advisor support. Your advisor figures out who is on the qual committee, and literally asks for them to deliver a “fail”. If the same student had his/her advisor’s support, the student would pass with the same performance. I don’t consider this to be really fair, but the truth is it happens. In a sense the advisor is asking to be “backed up” by other faculty when trying to get rid of a student.</p>

6

<p>Everything you will do in a PhD program will be “rigged”/“biased”, by your own definition. Whether or not you pass coursework, quals, and your dissertation defense are all determined by a quorom of scholars. In theory, the professors’ personal opinions of your personality characteristics should have nothing to do with it - it should be about your work and the quality of your research (and specifically, your exams). There is no way we can tell you whether the exams in your specific department are fair or “rigged,” or whether your particular administration will be fair.</p>

<p>My two cents is that you would have REALLY had to have transgressed in your department for an entire panel of mean-spirited tenured profs to conspire to fail you before they’ve even seen your results, and if you had messed up that badly, you’d know it already. In fact, if they wanted you out of the department, there’d be no reason to let you take quals. Your advisor would’ve just taken you aside and told you that they don’t want you to continue. They had the perfect opportunity to do so as you finished your MS - but they did not. If it was serious enough to arbitrarily decide that they want to fail you at quals for no reason, then it would be serious enough to just kick you out now.</p>

<p>Given that it doesn’t seem like that’s the case, I don’t think you should worry about your department failing you for any reason other than that you actually haven’t mastered the material. So study hard.</p>

<p>Questions:</p>

<p>1) Every department is different, but in my department on written quals all students are given the same questions. They have a choice of which questions they want to answer. (Oral quals are very subjective, but then again, you pick your own oral qual committee). Yes, the department is allowed to ask any arbitrary question, but the exam committee usually has a specific goal (i.e., to test the breadth of your knowledge in a specific field) and limit their questions to that. They can also arbitrarily decide if you fail, but they can do that at any point leading up to this and thereafter.</p>

<p>2) Nothing, really. Aside from trying to turn your relationship with these professors around, which is just a good idea in general. (And studying, of course.)</p>

<p>3) That’s usually not the way that exams are structured. I think you are also approaching this from the wrong angle. Even if your advisor likes you, there is zero benefit in softballing a student and passing them along, whether that’s for quals or dissertation research. A student treated with kid gloves does not develop the necessary skills to succeed, and will end up embarrassing the adviser and department later. Nobody wants that. Good students are admired partially because of their personality characteristics and partially because of their work ethic and the quality of their research and ideas. Professors who like students will appropriately challenge those students.</p>

<p>4) Of course it’s not pointless.</p>

<p>5) No. And no.</p>

7

<p>I had 4 quals that I took over the course of a year, different formats. I did fail one of them and had to do it over; there was never really any question of not moving forward at that point, they just wanted to make sure that I knew my stuff and could put ideas together; that I was ready for the dissertation. Maybe that I could deal with a setback. There was certainly some normal academic hazing involved but I never felt it was “rigged.” The same for about a dozen former and current colleagues, when we’ve swapped stories.</p>