Graduate students and professors are increasingly asking whether the dreaded comprehensive examinations, which can make or break the completion of an advanced degree, should be trashed.
Some professors firmly believe the tests play an important role in upholding academic standards, particularly in the humanities, and are needed to weed out students who have not mastered the ability to think or write critically about their field of study.
But others, including some faculty members and students, call the high-stakes tests an arbitrary, even punitive, exercise that’s purposely shrouded in secrecy and yields little evidence that real learning has taken place.
Students often fear the exams and can spend up to a year studying for them, slowing down their time to degree. Test-preparation materials often include exhaustive reading lists, making students feel as if they were playing Russian roulette as they have to pick and choose among the texts to study.
Sometimes students give up and drop out of their programs before facing the big exam, and many fail on the first attempt, including some who have earned high grade-point averages and successfully completed teaching assistantships. Master’s students take the tests at the end of their programs, and Ph.D. candidates often take them in their second or third year.
Discussions about whether the tests are a useful device for measuring student knowledge have been going on in departments for at least a decade. Some programs have already revamped their exams to tie them more closely to a student’s thesis or dissertation, and to be more relevant to what students plan to do in their careers.
Those institutions, which include doctoral programs at Ball State University, the University of Oregon, and Vanderbilt University, also invite graduate students to help shape the exam by creating their own reading lists or questions. And many programs, especially at the master’s level, have completely done away with the requirement of passing a test, a practice that dates to the Depression era.
Where comprehensive exams are still given, they are often being met with calls for change from graduate students, who are also sounding off on blogs and in other online forums. Students are questioning the ethics of programs’ admitting them, allowing them to accumulate debt as they pass required courses and provide cheap labor as instructors, and then giving them a test, years into their programs, that is hard to pass.
One graduate student in the English department at the University of Central Arkansas is among those who want to improve the exam process. Last semester she found herself doing battle over the bluebook with the chairman of her department.
‘A Weirdo Test’
Linda S. Bessette, who is 60 and works as a financial planner, enrolled part time in Central Arkansas’ master’s program in English in 2007.
Ms. Bessette knew that to earn her degree she would have to take the required comprehensive exam, but she was shocked when she learned that five out of six of her classmates failed it in April.
“I couldn’t understand why so many bright students had failed. They completed all their coursework, had high GPA’s, and one student even won a writing award,” Ms. Bessette said. “To have so many people fail, I thought it must have been an anomaly, a weirdo test.”
Baffled by so many failures, Ms. Bessette, who hadn’t yet taken the exam, decided to investigate by filling out a Freedom of Information Act request for the English department’s statistics on exam failures for the last decade.
The information, she said, showed that the English department had a high failure rate. Ms. Bessette sat down and wrote a formal complaint to Jay Ruud, chairman of the department, who said he had spent about 20 hours gathering the data she had requested.
In her complaint, Ms. Bessette asked some pointed questions: Why would so many of the English graduate students fail to pass the comprehensive exam if they had successfully completed their coursework? What happens to students who leave the university without an advanced degree, after having spent approximately $1,000 per class and sometimes several years of their lives? Why would the faculty, who would know graduate students personally but also know the statistical reality that a number of them would leave the university without a degree, be complicit in such a process?
Ms. Bessette argued that the department’s exam was “fatally flawed” and “capricious.” She complained that students were given vague instructions on what to study and were required to read and know everything.
On Day 1 of the exam, students were given 30 identification questions, of which they had to answer 20 and get 16 correct. They were asked to identify and write briefly about literary characters, poetic terms, and short verses like, “Sweet Auburn! Loveliest village of the plain,” the opening line of Oliver Goldsmith’s 18th-century poem “The Deserted Village.”
On Day 2, students were given seven essay prompts covering seven different historical periods of literature. The students had to write on topics such as the concept of nobility as portrayed in medieval literature or regionalism in American literature since 1860.
“These are people whose lives are being put on hold ... students whose names were already on the graduation list,” Ms. Bessette said in an interview. “Some had plans to get married, move on with their lives, get jobs, enroll in Ph.D. programs. They met all the requirements, and now they were in professional limbo because they couldn’t pull out some esoteric piece of literature from 2,000 years ago. That seemed absurd to me.”
Why Test at All?
Mr. Ruud, meanwhile, said he had been trying to get the department to revamp the test for a decade. “I thought the format of the exam was somewhat behind the times,” he said, noting that the identification section seemed particularly dated.
In his response to Ms. Bessette, though, he defended the test’s importance. It “ensures a degree of rigor in the program,” he wrote in an e-mail to her, and without such an exam the master’s degree “would be of little worth.”
He also said the failure rate was not as bad as Ms. Bessette had portrayed it. Since January 2003, he said, 88 students had sat for the test. Of those, 17 had not yet passed it. (Students may take the test over, but must wait several months.) Mr. Ruud said reasons for a failure to pass include students’ serious illness, moving away for another job, or allowing the six-year limit imposed by the graduate school to lapse.
Seven of those students, Mr. Ruud said, have another shot at taking the exam. Of those who passed the exam, 22 had to take it twice and seven took it three times before passing.
Comprehensive exams give students a chance to “look back on everything they have learned and think about it in a coherent way and see how all the parts relate to each other,” Mr. Ruud said in an interview.
“The faculty can see the students demonstrate the breadth of their knowledge in an exam in a way that can’t be effectively gauged in class discussions or a paper,” he continued. “The reading list is designed to force students to learn outside the class.”
Unsatisfied with Mr. Ruud’s response, Ms. Bessette fired back.
“The fact that so many fail the exam on one or even two attempts, after having spent thousands of dollars and years on the effort, while earning adequate and sometimes exemplary grades,” she wrote, “suggests to me at least one of several unpleasant conclusions: The coursework is inappropriately easy, while the comps are appropriately rigorous.”
Since the correspondence between the graduate student and her department chairman, the comprehensive exam has been changed. Mr. Ruud said that the process of revising the test had been under way before Ms. Bessette wrote to him. Over the years, he said, faculty members in the department have debated the issue.
“There were many points of view,” he said, “ranging from, ‘If we don’t make them take an exam, then all our standards have gone away’ to ‘Why give them a test at all?’”
Beginning next month, Mr. Ruud said, students will be required to answer four essay questions over a nine-hour, two-day period. The controversial identification section that many people failed is gone, and the reading list has been cut down to 50 titles from 165. The exam will still be handwritten in blue books.
A Mysterious Challenge
Among English master’s programs at the 43 institutions designated by Central Arkansas as its peers, only 13 others require a comprehensive exam. Nineteen give students the choice of taking an exam, writing a thesis, or completing some other written project, and 11 have no requirement.
The University of North Florida got rid of its exam requirement five years ago. “We didn’t find the exam useful in terms of assessing student knowledge,” said Betsy Nies, an associate professor and the graduate-program adviser in the English department.
Ms. Nies said the department had decided instead to review student essays from courses, which officials believe better demonstrate a mastery of learning objectives.
Indiana State University did away with its exam requirement more than a decade ago. Graduate students in the English department now must write a thesis or complete a creative project instead.
“People began to feel that an isolated test over a comp reading list didn’t really represent what we wanted to see from students’ work,” said Robert Perrin, chairman of Indiana State’s English department. “We felt that a collection of short stories or novels more fully represents what we wanted to see.”
Graduate programs have perpetuated some of the problems students face in comprehensive exams, he said. Courses have changed, and so, too, have areas of specialization. But, he said, departments haven’t always done a good job of modifying or rethinking the final project.
“We can’t change everything that leads up to it without modifying what our final assessment will be,” Mr. Perrin said. “We can’t use an exam that was designed 30 years ago to finish a program that has been modified. It seems illogical.”
Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, said that most universities had moved away from using exams, like the one Central Arkansas had been giving, that attempt to cover “everything from early literature to the contemporary.”
Exams, she said, should not be punitive or serve a gatekeeping function. The graduate-student experience, she added, should be about collaborative learning and achieving academic goals, not about presenting students with an impossible and mysterious challenge.
“We owe our students a cogent explanation of how our assessment tools relate to our curriculum,” she said. “That’s a basic contractual agreement.”
