Comps Exams EXPOSED The REAL Reason You're Struggling

You've made it through all of your coursework. You just have one more hurdle to clear before you get to your dissertation, and that's comprehensive exams. Not every school has these, but if you have them, you are aware of them and you need to prepare and understand what's coming. My name is Dr. Steve Tippins. I've served on over 300 dissertation committees and helped hundreds of people complete their dissertations. What I want to talk about today is helping you prepare for and get finished with and through successfully your comprehensive exams. The truth is, many people get to hear and then stall out, either through fear or not being prepared or a number of other reasons. But your comprehensive exams are just a hurdle. We want you to be ready, we want you to be prepared, and we want you to clear the hurdle running fast so that you're ready for your dissertation phase. By the end of this video, you, you're going to know what to expect and how to strategically prepare for your comprehensive exams. Let's start out first with what is a comprehensive exam? And that's kind of a moving target because what used to be 100 years ago is different now at many schools. In theory, a comprehensive exam is you've made it through your coursework, how much have you retained? Do you have a good knowledge of the body of literature, the body of knowledge that's needed in order to move forward? How we assess, assess whether you're ready has changed over time. One thing a comprehensive exam is not, it's not a dump. All the knowledge that's ever been created in all of the courses you've taken. It's not that. The idea is, do you understand the material? Not have you memorized everything? But can you synthesize the material to come up with cogent arguments and discussions about specific topics? What are the different types of comprehensive exams? The additional comprehensive exam, which many schools still do, you get to the end of your coursework, and then you get a time period, a month, three months, whatever your school comes up with to prepare for one, two or three days of questions where you come in and you are given questions, you don't get them ahead of time, you're given questions and you get to write your answers to those questions over those, let's say, two days. The first day you might get three questions, maybe four, and then you go back and collapse. And then the second day you come back in and have four more questions and you get to write or type your answers to those questions, and then you have completed the exam. Another type of comprehensive exam is where you are given questions ahead of time and you get a time period, let's say three weeks, to come up with the appropriate answers for these questions. A third type is, hey, let's put together your dissertation prospectus or even proposal. Let's get your dissertation idea fleshed out. And then the committee will look at that and see are you ready to move forward? So those are the three basic types. Sometimes also they can be followed by an oral component. One of the things you want to do is ask about previous comprehensive exams. What are the questions that have been asked? You're not going to get the same questions again. And most likely, but if you get 2, 3, 4, 5 years worth of these, you'll get to see there's questions on this topic and questions on this topic. So it's going to help you prepare for the exam. One thing I've heard people say is, oh, it's much better to have a take home where you get to prepare and you know the question. You know, I don't know if that's much better because if I'm giving you something to take home, I can expect perfection because you now get access to anything you want to answer it versus hey, here's a question, answer it right now. I may not expect as much perfection because you don't have access to all the literature in the world. You just have access to what you prepared for to take this comprehensive exam. It almost doesn't matter what the approach is, the purpose is again, are you ready? Do you have a good handle on the material of your discipline, whether it's economics or education or physics? Are you prepared to move forward with your material and do you have a grasp on how that material fits with other material? I'll give you an example. In my case, I was given the traditional route. I had two days and eight questions. Now in my case also, I was the first person in the program, so there was no one to go to, to ask, hey, what were the previous questions like? So I prepared over three months and we'll talk about preparation so that I could come in and I couldn't have a computer, I couldn't have anything I had to handwrite and I wrote 48 sides of paper over two days. Now one of the things I did that I was told, and that's a common mistake people make, is not only did I answer the questions, I wanted to show them how much I knew. So I added all kinds of citations and other material that most likely didn't answer the questions. So I almost did like a dump of everything. That I think I knew so that I could show them. I know a whole bunch of stuff. Let me go forward. Maybe you just want to concentrate on answering the questions to follow on that. I also had an oral component to my comprehensive exams. Interestingly, nobody in my college had had an oral in years. So there was. And since my department was, I was the first. So they wanted to be very technically on doing everything properly. They said we have to give them an oral. So I couldn't go ask people what to expect in an oral. I can't stress enough to go in respectful. So when I went into my oral exam, I walked into a room with all of the faculty from my department, 12 people, let's say first, I didn't know that was going to happen, who was going to be there. And they began to ask questions and I wasn't quite ready for all of this. And my defense mechanism is to be a little jovial maybe or maybe look a little flippant. And a number of people thought I wasn't taking this with enough seriousness. I wasn't really as serious as I should have been. I eventually overcame it. Obviously I got to hear. But I would caution you to be very respectful when and if you have to go into oral exams. How do you prepare for this? Well, if you've got a take home version, the preparation is, oh, here are the questions I now have to answer them. And you have to be able to say, I've got a limited time period, let me set up an outline and then go through and you know, support, fill in that outline within given time periods. You may have three questions in three weeks. Well, that means, gosh, I'll try to allocate a week to each question. One of the things I tell people when they have a limit like this is let's say you have three weeks. Really you want to finish in about 18 days, not 21. Because if you finish in 18 days, you have a few days to go back through and say after you've done this and you've come back to it, say, does this make any sense? Did I really answer the question? And if you can do it with even more time, a week left, you really have time to digest and then make corrections to anything that seems to be going in a different direction. So budget your time. If you have the traditional path, well then you've got to go through pretty much every, every class and the literature from every class. And what I like to see people do is, okay, go through a quick read, abstract, maybe methodology results of the top 15 or 20 papers for each course. I know this is a lot of work. You make a pass through every course. Now start condensing it down and condense it down again. So you're going through iteration after iteration of it so that you actually understand and it becomes part of you. And you can now say, Smith 20002018 said this, but that's different than Jones 2022. You're able to synthesize the material because that's what they're looking for. When you get into this traditional exam situation and you have your. I'll use again the example four questions in a day. I would quickly outline my answer for each one because time tends to go away quickly in these situations. I'll tell you, for me, if I don't keep concentrating on something, if I go to something else, I lose it. And I haven't admitted this to a lot of people, but I was writing a question and I took it with me into the bathroom because I had to go to the bathroom, and I wrote in the bathroom for half an hour so I wouldn't lose my train of thought. But an outline shows that if you run out of time and you've got an outline there, they can see where you were going, and it allows you to fill things in. Some people in their preparation like to create models with concept links and all kinds of links showing how these interact with each other. And, you know, many people are visual learners, so if you can do that, that can be very helpful for you. I've also seen people go in, come up with an outline, and then very quickly write in seven authors so that they don't have to go back and say, what was it? Oh, I'm working on this one. It's going to be Jones, it's going to be Smith, and just very quickly write them in and then maybe outline other questions and then come back and say, make sure that you're going to include Jones and Smith and everything else. What's going to stop you and hurt you in one of these traditional comprehensive exams is if you're just memorizing facts, because memorizing facts isn't going to do it for you. Your committee, your department, your faculty are looking to see, do you actually understand the material? Look, an undergraduate can go to the library or onto their computer and come up with 27 articles and then spit back, Jones said this, and Smith said this, and Johnson said this. That can be done easily. It's your interpretation of this material and what material you bring in to answer a question. Now, I know somebody who went into a comprehensive exam and there was a question about a year that had something to do, it might have been accounting, and there was a tax law and its impact on something. And there was a typo on the exam, and they couldn't talk to anybody. So they're talking, let's say, about a 1978 tax law, and it said 1979. So after the minute and a half of panic, this person said, started by saying, I assume you're talking about the tax act of 1978, and answered it. And they got all done. And a week later they were talking to somebody who had been reviewing these, and he said, God, that was hard when it said 1979, and I had to go change it to 1978. And the professor looked at him and said, well, there was no law in 1979. So you probably could have just said there was no law in 1979 and been done. Now that would take a lot of guts to be able to just say that I think they took the right approach. But, you know, that can be stressful. I haven't talked yet about preparing for the third type, and that is your dissertation. This is a great type of comprehensive exam in my mind, because I see too many people get done with their classes, then do a comprehensive exam which has nothing to do with their research. So they've taken 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 months of time to get ready for that. Now they have to come off of that time commitment and stress and get ready for their dissertation and even decide what the idea is. But if I can take that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 months and be working on my dissertation idea, that puts me so much further ahead than the person who is doing the traditional comprehensive exam. So it's just getting, you know, my introduction, what's the literature? What's my gap in the literature? I come up with a problem and a purpose and some research questions and how I'm going to do it. And this is going to be incredibly helpful for you on your dissertation, but also in finishing faster. What do I expect on the day of my comprehensive exam? If it's the dissertation proposal, I'm going to turn it in and maybe we'll discuss it. If it's the approach where you had questions ahead of time, you're going to turn them in. But if it's the day where you're going to write questions yourself, or a day or two or three, first, expect to be sequestered somewhere, most likely without any technology. Second, expect it's going to be a long day. So Be comfortable. They may limit you on what you can bring in. Be prepared. If they say you can bring a pen, I would bring like four. You don't want to have the stress of something running out of ink. If they say you can bring a calculator for whatever reason, bring two. You just don't want to then have an hour of running around a hall with all the stress of trying to find somebody and saying this doesn't work. You know, be prepared ahead of time. Dress comfortably. No one's going to be taking pictures of you during this. This is not going to get posted on YouTube or on your Facebook page. You're going to be there for maybe eight hours of expressing what you know on a topic. So you want to be able to be comfortable with what you're doing and how you feel during this. Ask ahead of time about breaks. Do I get breaks? When can I take breaks? You know, eight hours in a row of doing something is done difficult. I've seen people, you know, be given lunch breaks and go back and refer to literature and it depends on whether how they trust people. Whether you get like certain questions in the morning and then you have to be done or they're going to give you all for the day and then maybe you could look at some stuff at lunchtime. But you want a break and you want breaks whenever possible. That one, refresh you. But two, don't interrupt your flow. The idea whether it's a take home or in person, it's substance, okay? Get the substance down first, then make it pretty. The words flow afterwards. Again, on that take home, you're going to have to do both because they're going to be expecting closer to perfection and they're going to be expecting that you've worked on these questions for 8, 10 hours a day over that time period. That said, faculty do understand time constraints. So if you've written the wrong year in on a citation or if maybe you had an incomplete thought, when it comes especially to the in person three day ordeal, we'll just call it, they may be a little more lenient, but you want to be as thorough as possible. Let's go back to that oral. If you have to take an oral exam, you're going to have a room full of people, some of whom may be very supportive, some of whom may think that it's best to try to trick you to see how you understand things. I'll go back again to my oral item. Remember someone who could be a little tricky asking me a question and a lot and I kind of understood what they were asking. And I started going. And I was up in front of a room and I had a board and I put an axes and I started a graph and all kinds of other stuff. And I realized after about five minutes of talking that I was pretty confused. And I could look at their faces and say, wow, he's not really answering this. What I should have done is said, checked. How am I doing? Am I answering your question? If I didn't ask, he wasn't going to give me any help. He was going to let me hang myself. And I was pretty far along the line of hanging myself until someone else interrupted me and said, you know, in Steve's defense, he hasn't labeled these axes because I couldn't remember which one was which because I think he means. And he said the exact thing I needed and I was able to bring myself back. But it took me another 10 minutes to recover from what I had been laying out. So be prepared to be a little confused. Ask questions. You can become almost collegial with this. Okay, that's interesting. Have I answered your question or. That's a really interesting approach. You're looking at it. I haven't thought of it this way. Here's the way I would approach it. So engage them more. It's much easier to get accepted from people who are engaged with you now. One thing I found out after the fact, in mine, there were four classifications upon completing completion of my comprehensive exam. There was high pass, there was pass, there was low pass, and then there was do it again. You didn't pass. I was given a pass. I couldn't figure out why I would have wanted a high pass because it was no different. But I realized, wow, I think I studied too much because I could have gotten by with a low pass. But one other outcome is at times you'll have people say, okay, but I want you to rewrite this question or redo this. So you want to get by with a pass if possible, to start with. If you don't pass, it's not the end of the world. Most places are reasonable and will allow a second attempt. Typically, though, it's not like next week. It's months down the line, five, six months. And there are some schools that only allow this to happen once a year. It's okay. You learn from it and you move forward with it. It's not a straight line. It may look like it in from the rear view mirror. Oh, I entered and it was six years later. Four years later, I was done. Well, there were ups and downs. And this might be a temporary down, but it might lead to a big up in the long run. It does not mean a lack of intelligence. It may just mean you weren't prepared for it properly. I know a number of people who have PhDs, accomplished academics who did not pass their comprehensive exam the first time. I've also worked with a number of people to prepare for their comprehensive exams. So if you're interested, click the link below to find out about our five step process. Process to helping people pass their and complete their dissertations as well as become a member of our dissertation help group. Once you've completed the exam, what comes next? Well, first collapse, breathe, relax. And that doesn't happen in a day. You know, you might need three days or four days, but take a little bit of time. Don't just jump right back into something because your brain just needs some space and your family might need to see you a little bit too. Then look at your university requirements. Hey, did I take the traditional exam? Comprehensive exam. Now I've got to go and start preparing for my dissertation. Same thing with the hey, you get four take home questions. Now I've got to start preparing for my dissertation. So it's what are my university guidelines? Is there a template? Who's going to be my chair? Who's going to be my committee? What are my ideas? And start off that way. If it's the third approach we talked about where you're working on your proposal, then hallelujah, just keep working more on it. You might get feedback from your committee at this point. Start with that feedback and start moving forward. This is a transition point for you. At many schools when you pass your comprehensive exams, you're now considered a candidate or abd all but dissertation. Some schools wait till you've got your proposal completed. But but you're getting to the point where it's one more hurdle your dissertation. And that's the fun part. That's why you got into this, to do this type of research. So you're getting close. You're almost there. If you're looking for help in getting through your comprehensive exams and completing your dissertation after that, click the link below to access our five step process to dissertation acceptance and to join our free dissertation help community. I'd love to help you.