What Are Qualifying Exams Good For?

Short Answer:

Absolutely nothing.

Longer Answer:

Abso-fucking-lutely nothing.

Actual Answer:

You have three lists: one for theory, one for genre, and one for period.  (Some substitutions are allowed.)  Each should contain thirty works.  None ever does.  At your list-meeting, the members of your committee decide what belongs on each list.  They never reach a decision.  They "compromise" by including every work any of them mentioned.  You now have nine months to read three lists.  Each consists of sixty works.  Let me do the math for you:

270 / 180 = FUCKED

Because you are.  You cannot read a book every 1.5 days and have anything intelligent to say about it.  But you must read a book every 1.5 days and have something intelligent to say about it.  You must also remember these intelligent things because one day soon the graduate coordinator will escort you into a room in which you will sit with all the books on your lists and write for six hours.  On Tuesday you will write about your A List.  On Thursday you will write about your B List.  Only "write" is not an appropriate word for what you will do.  You do not write:

You eject words.

Your committee wants words, damn it, and you will give them words.  You will not give them punctuation because punctuation is for chumps and you will not give them grammar because they wants words not grammar and they cannot has big word because big word not available in time are been allotted and your word cannot do sense because you to be in rooms for six hour and is under pressure and if you does not performs good you and your asses are to be kicked from grad schools to curbs and then you died.

Fortunately, the qualifying exams have a purpose: namely, to have you do something you'll never again be asked to do in your professional career, so that you may better appreciate how well-suited you are for it and only it.  Because no one does well on their exams.  No one "passes" in the conventional sense.  Your committee is always disappointed.  Everyone on it thought you were going to be the first person in the history of academia to perform exceptionally under extreme duress and on a exam the likes of which you've never taken (nor will ever take again).  This disappointment is reasonable.  To be expected.

You will do equally poorly on your oral examination (covering your C List).  Your committee members will lower their eyes and shake their heads.  That is what they are there for.  They want kabuki from a method actor.  You are there to oblige.  You dance inappropriately and they try not to laugh.  You are tell them sentences with some word and they try not to laughs.  Then they are pass you and you can have happy and alcohol. 

Your life are now for good. 

You is ABD.

Comments

[SEK]

The kabuki/method bit belongs to Holbo, but I couldn't remember where I found it, so there's no link. And with that, I'm off to commiserate!

[Mikhail Emelianov]

good luck with all of that - it sounds like a lot of fun - for some reason my institution allowed one to spread the exams a bit so i don't remember it being so close to each other, plus i also discovered as a non-native speaker of english i had an extra hour that i could use, apparently to correct my horrible english and sex it up a bit... still a great pain in the ass, i concur.

[Ahistoricality]

I had a two-hour oral on four lists, each of which was approximately sixty works (more, for the major field). I've always suspected that my advisor did some serious arm-twisting to get me a pass, probably on condition that I never teach in my minor fields....

The General Exams are actually useful in that regard, though: they are the last reading you'll do for the next several years in all the subjects you'll be teaching in for the next forty. Of course, your advisors don't think of it as teaching-prep, or else they'd structure them differently....

[The Little Womedievalist]

And there we go... the reason why the Lil'Womedievalist married the headless Darwinist. I'z been got. :)

[tomemos]

I have to say, I didn't enjoy my exams by any stretch but I did think they were useful to me in two ways. First, they helped me build up an expertise in my (purported) field, even with the books that I didn't quite make it to, so that I could focus on my dissertation without having the huge gaps in my scholarship looming over me. Second, they helped me practice holding forth on literature in front of an inquisitive, not-necessarily-sympathetic crowd, which I have to think would be helpful in job interviews, conferences, etc. I've known grad students who I presume write well, but who simply can't converse about literature; I don't think they're going very far on the job market. So, the exams: not good to do, but good to have done.

[Mike S]

Scott, so should I slit my wrists now or after I take my exams?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Huh. I remember some aspects of my quals quite well. Such as that for the possible old-style questions on which you had to figure out on what day something was going to be visible -- did I mention these were astrophysics quals? -- you had to know how many days were in each month. For some reason this kindergarden level bit of knowledge was something I'd never quite picked up. So I amazed the other students by contributing to our study sessions that thing where you hold your fists out as if you have "LOVE" and "HATE" tattooed on them and count off the months as knuckles and the gaps between. That was my best rediscovery since I had to teach this Astro 100 student how to subtract using the numbers line.

What I also remember about the quals was that you only got to take them once; if you failed, that was it. This seemed particularly unfair, given that in order to be prepared for them you first had to take all your courses, which years of study would then be useless if you had a bad day on that day or something.

I passed my quals and successfully went through my thesis proposal. But I quit grad school shortly thereafter, so in retrospect, I'm not really sure why I was worried about them.

[middlebrow]

This so perfectly represents my exam experience! I remember toward the end of my oral exams the chair of my committee asked me some question about William James. I can't remember the question. I couldn't remember anything about William James at the moment. But I answered, incorrectly, and he responded with a pretty good imitation of a quiz show buzzer. It shocked, I think, even the other committee members in the room, and there was a short silence while we all appreciated the absurdity of the moment. Everything else from my exams is a blur, but I still remember the quiz show buzzer imitation. A real learning experience.

[eb]

I was very happy to pass my qualifying exams and wouldn't ever want to take them again. But:

I was really interested in nearly everything on my lists and frustrated that I hadn't been able to talk about them with anyone at length during the preparation: most discussion, when there was any, with other students and professors was geared towards the exam, for obvious reasons. Even though I did fine without having read everything, I skimmed a lot of things I wanted to read for my own sake, and which I probably would have had time to read. And I was unhappy that I now had to set aside all of these interesting things to focus on my (also interesting) dissertation topic.

I probably wouldn't have been wrong to drop out the day I passed instead of dragging things out a few more years.

[Sisyphus]

Congratulations somebody!!!!!! Have some beer!

Wait, what? Are we celebrating someone passing exams or not? We could celebrate the fact that some of us will never have to take quals again. Whoo-hoo!

Actually, they changed ours to make them much more humane and relevant, it seems, than this description. However, what I remember hating most after passing mine is that went home and slept/watched bad tv for about three weeks afterwards (i.e. winter break) and discovered that while I could not recall major character names and important details during the exam, afterwards I could remember entire Brady Bunch plots and dialogue as I stared blankly at Nick at Nite. WTF!?!? I needed those brain cells; couldn't I reuse?

We won't even begin to talk about my subsequent "Behind the Music" addiction problem.

[sharon]

Apologies for my British ignorance (my last exam, apart from my PhD viva, was when I was an undergrad), but what is it you're qualifying for?

[The Constructivist]

I really enjoyed the process of constructing my lists and the chance to build some small areas of expertise, but while I understood the purpose of general exams, I still find it hilarious that I did best on a medieval question. What I really enjoyed was the freedom to read on my own, away from coursework, although it was long enough ago and traumatic enough that the actual timeline is a bit fuzzy. Actually, that was what I liked about the early ABD years, too, back when the job market was far enough off to be a mere source of unease rather than angst. Come to think of it, I haven't had as much fun as an academic until the relatively light teaching load of the Fulbright enabled me to replicate the reading for exams experience without the pesky exams at the end....

Yeah, I've become the kind of early-mid-career professor at which I used to gape uncomprehendingly and rather resentfully at when they insisted I would look back on my grad school years as a great time.

I'll go away now.

[hermit greg]

In the program I dropped, quals were nothing for most persons: little more than a signature on a piece of paper. They had been replaced by comps, which was two lists: 100-120 + 30-60, a portfolio featuring two major essays and an annotated bibliography, and finally, an oral portfolio defense. On the plus side: nobody got locked in a room to write; on the down side: nobody got locked in a room to write, so the tendency to expect publishable work in the portfolio was very high. It makes me sick thinking about it.

Anyway, congratulations to whoever passed.

[uncomplicatedly]

Thanks for making me laugh as I brace myself for another fucking day of writtens. If it's any indication, I am typing this between a browser tab for the wikipedia page on The Playboy of the Western World and one for the sparknotes to Pygmalion, which turns out to have a very different ending from My Fair Lady, which is basically what I was going to talk about if asked. Oh genre tokenism.

[slavdude]

When I did my Generals 15 years ago (in a history program, mind you, so YMMV), I had to read items in four different subjects starting in September/October and going to the end of the following April. Basically, it amounted to about 200 books and a few articles. I read them (skimmed them, actually) at a rate of about 1 per day, taking notes as I went along. After each book, I summarized what I had read in a page. When the time came to review and study for my 2-hour orals, I read over the summaries and put them together as a continuous narrative in my mind. (It helped, of course, that 3 of the 4 history fields were related--2 Russian, 1 European intellectual--the other was U.S. history.) The day before I took the exam, I stopped studying and relaxed on the recommendation of one of the professors for whom I was reading--so I went to see "Wayne's World," which was out in the theaters at the time.

Needless to say, I passed, and even though I am no longer in academia (I changed careers about 10 years ago and stopped teaching altogether about a year and a half ago), I still do remember most of what I assimilated during that freaky 8-9 months in grad school.

[SEK]

Mikhail,

No, not fun at all. The wife made it through her writtens intact, though.

Ahistoricality,

I don't think that much arm-twisting was required: professors know everyone does poorly on them, so they lower their expectations accordingly. Were you to devote one year to a single list instead of three, I could see some serious intellectual work cropping up in exams, but three lists? It's not going to happen. [Just pretend I wrote a really long thing about the difference between what I thought the state of evolutionary theory was during my exams versus what I know it to be now.] The other thing about the exam structure is that it privileges certain kind of thinkers of others: namely, those adept at juggling generalities in real-time. I think quickly on my feet, but the kind of scholarship I do can't be spun with broad terms and sweeping claims. I need:

1. Mountains of evidence. 2. Close-readings.

Neither is possible in an exam setting. The wife does paleography and the history of the book, so quite a bit of her intellectual output simply can't be replicated in an exam setting.

Tomemos,

I agree with the first half -- it's a chance to read everything you could conceivably be asked to teach -- but I don't think it's preparation for job talks. At job talks, you're fielding questions not about a broad swath of issues raised by a generic, theoretical or historical interest: you're present the specific results of your specific inquiries, and you're expected to be an expert because, well, you should've acquired some expertise producing your dissertation.

Mike,

By all means, don't slit them yet. Spending a year reading and reading and reading is a blast. It's only when writing headnotes and/or the exams themselves loom that dread surfaces.

Rich,

I don't think anyone actually fails their quals. I know no one at Irvine ever has. Sure, some people don't succeed the first time, and they're forced to re-answer their questions in a ten- or fifteen-page essay. (Which, to be frank, is a better model all around, since it actually resembles the work we actually do.)

Middlebrow,

I can't believe I've never told this story before (on the blog, as I think I told it to you last weekend), but it'll have to wait, as I need to set it up just so. More shortly.

eb,

I read everything on my lists, but 1) I'd already read much of it before and 2) I relied on reviews and/or critical literature to keep myself fresh. As for talking prior to the tests, well, I was lucky enough to have a robust community of Americanist slackers to shoot shit with as I prepared. Not everyone's so lucky. Oddly, exam prep was the least isolating period of grad school by far: you read a lot, but you needed to process it, only without having to hole up and write papers.

Sisyphus,

Half-passed. The wife's orals are next week. As for post-qual detox: I played Civilizations for a month and read five or six novels not at all relevant to my work. It was a glorious time, but alas, never to be replicated. I feel guilty leaving this comment. I should be working. That little voice booms:

IF YOU CAN STILL TYPE IN WORDS YOU COULD STILL BE WORKING!

Sharon,

The privilege of slaving away on a dissertation no one will ever read.

Constructivist,

Can you feel me seething? Because I am. With jealously. And rage, possibly.

Uncomplicatedly,

Good luck! (Not that you'll need it.) (Make that: not that you'll have needed it. If you're still in Clark's office at this hour ... things haven't gone well.)

Hermit Greg,

I absolutely love the portfolio idea. (We had something of the sort -- not for exams so much as initiation -- but no more.) I should be more specific: I absolutely love anything that replicates actual working conditions. Basing someone's future on their ability to do something they've never done before and will never be asked to do again is silly.

Slavdude,

I hate you.* The Five Year Rule will eventually apply to everything on my exams, and since I've spent the years since manically re-reading the books I'm writing on, I'm this close to being a myopic fool. I must reach the market soon, or all is lost.

*Not really. I only wish my head wasn't a sieve.

[Sisyphus]

I'm going to disagree with you, SEK, and take Tomemos's side here: our first quals have been redesigned from the old "three days of writtens" method to orals, a little over two hours, whereby you present material and are grilled similar to at a job talk.

I think it's *really* helpful this way. Not that you do it successfully *in* the exam, but that you get the feel of it and then later work on how to argue your points respectfully with profs as colleagues and not a student regurgitating answers. FYI, we've had a lot of our grads fail the quals recently, I think mainly because they sounded like undergrads reciting plot points rather than mature scholars engaging in discussions of the field. More than content, almost, the profs look for a certain professionalism of response and willingness to "push back" against intimidation.

So, if your school's exams aren't set up to do this, I think they should be. (takes off pontificating hat.)

[Ahistoricality]

I don't think that much arm-twisting was required.... I don't think anyone actually fails their quals.

I agree that the exams are intended to test general comprehension of the field rather than deep knowledge (in fact, we called them "General Exams"), but failure is indeed possible, and I was unable to answer an uncomfortable number of questions that they clearly thought were "warm-up." (I'm really good at distilling and integrating arguments; lousy at citing specific scholars and details, so in an exam context it sounds like I'm tapdancing around not knowing anything). I've definitely heard of people failing oral exams -- it's not a model that we get to practice much and stage-fright (or some other variation on brain-freeze) strikes a small but real percentage of examinees (most of whom get over it and do fine the second... or third... time, but some really don't get past it). Written exams can be grueling, but we're used to them.

[hermit greg]

Don't get me wrong: the portfolio in theory is indeed a good thing. It's prone to bloat, however, so it really, really matters that your adviser be someone who can recognize the volume of work you're taking on and back you off of it. That's not particularly different from other exam types, of course, but look at it this way: after the portfolio system was initiated, the average time-to-degree in that department shot up to nearly ten years.

And I can tell you a very sad story about how heartbreaking it is to fail those orals.

[The Constructivist]

Ah, I had forgotten the incredulous seething rage. Like some Faulkner character or other. Thanks for reminding me! Peace offering.