In the past, graduate school students could mosey their ways into the preliminary examination, sometimes as late as one week before the start of their doctoral dissertations.
Now, as administrators try to pinpoint when and where graduate student attrition rates are high, curriculum committees are considering potential changes to the exam to benefit students in all departments of the Graduate School.
"We have not yet reached a clear decision on what changes, if any, we wish to institute," said Richard MacPhail, director of graduate studies in chemistry. "While we feel that our current preliminary examination process works well in most cases, we are looking for things we can do to enhance the rigor and uniformity of the process."
The exam, known by many graduate students simply as "the prelim," is the traditional gateway for doctoral candidates that marks the transition from classwork to dissertation research. Although typically administered in the third year, the exam assesses different skills and has been given at various times by department--from the third semester to right before students present their dissertations. In the humanities and social sciences, the exam is designed to measure the student's breadth of knowledge in the field by answering critical questions about academic texts, while in the laboratory sciences, the exam can often be as unstructured as a research grant proposal. Either way, the prelim is designed to measure the capacity for dissertation work.
When a student elects to take the exam, supervisory committees consisting of department professors, often with whom the student has had coursework, administer the test.
"The prelim is a check to make sure your head is screwed on right and shows you can think about research," said Lewis Siegel, dean of the Graduate School.
MacPhail said one possible improvement the chemistry department is considering administering the exam earlier to prepared students.
Because failure of the exam results in serious consequences for a student's future, an exam administered earlier in the program could serve as a reality check for students who are unsure or uncommitted to their present field of study. Sometimes, in the case of failure, students may retake the exam the following semester or opt to complete a master's program instead, depending on the department and the circumstances.
"The graduate program is quite arduous and not for everyone," said Leslie Saper, director of graduate studies in mathematics. "It is better for both the student and the program if this is realized early on."
Attrition of students out of programs is a problem that Graduate School administrators began targeting earlier this year. Last month, deans held roundtable dinners with many graduate studies directors by field to discuss how different departments could combat the problem.
Leigh Deneef, associate dean of the Graduate School, said some students find the prelim an ideal opportunity to leave a program if they had already been contemplating such a decision based on other considerations.
"Some students who have been wavering might make that choice [of withdrawing], but it's not necessarily the preliminary exam that causes attrition," he said.
Although the content and design of prelims vary widely by department, there have been no efforts to standardize the prelim across the school. Nevertheless, Siegel said departments could learn from each other.
"In the lab sciences especially, the preliminary exam is a smooth transition to a doctoral education that is almost seamless," Siegel said.
He added that by creating a proposal--either for their own research or a mock proposal--students gain valuable experience in grant-writing and examining very specific research problems.
"In chemistry... the examination is based on accomplishment on a research project and defending the validity and importance of the project. The student should take ownership of the project," MacPhail said.
Robert Keohane, James B. Duke professor and director of graduate studies in political science, said his department's prelim is tailored to individuals and their interests. The exam consists of both a written and oral section covering two subfields within the department in which the student concentrated in coursework. During the exam, the student is given a day to work on each subfield, and the exam is open-book.
In English, students also take two written exams in the form of take-home papers or four-hour classroom exams in a student's major and two minor areas of concentration, followed two weeks later by an oral examination.
Margaret Pier, director of graduate studies in romance studies, said French students focus on one author, one genre and one period, while Spanish students are tested on five of six subfields.
Since successful completion of the exam is a nonconditional requirement for much of the dissertation research and conferring of a doctorate degree, the exam will continue to hold a central role in the process of turning students into scholars, even as departments consider ways of making the exam more relevant to graduate education and maybe, just a little less fearsome.
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