Steve Tippins Ph.D. advises students taking eight-hour comprehensive exams to dress for comfort, not appearance, and to ask about break policies upfront. Breaks refresh your mind and help you maintain focus, but schedule them so they don't interrupt your thinking. Some schools allow lunch breaks for reviewing literature.
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 8 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? 8 hours in a row of doing something is difficult. Cult. I've seen people 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.
