The comprehensive examination is a critical part of the GPIS PhD program. You should not view it simply as a bureaucratic hurdle to pass over on your way to the dissertation. Instead, before embarking on narrowly focused dissertation work, the comprehensive examination establishes that you have the broad familiarity and expertise with the field that is the mark of a doctoral education. It is the checkpoint that confirms that you are ready to pass from being a student to a scholar. The process of preparing for the comprehensive exam should help you organize and reflect on the variety of things you have learned over the past few years. While to this point, each of your seminars has been a distinct learning experience, you now can think about how your interdisciplinary work in international studies fits together. Preparation for the comprehensive exam should help you become better able to integrate and utilize the knowledge you have gained in your graduate study. It is also critically important for embarking on the dissertation. The best dissertations are effectively connected to the central questions and literature of the field. Unless you have developed an integrated overview of the field you will not have the necessary foundation for dissertation work.
It is important to note that the comprehensive PhD examination is not simply a test of your cumulative knowledge of seminar materials. It is, rather, a test of your preparation to work as an independent scholar at the highest level. By now you should be functioning like a scholar, and not just like a student. You should be aware of the major journals in your field and should be paying attention to them. You should know what the most important books, articles, and debates are regardless of whether they were used in your classes. It may have been a few years since you took IR theory, but it is unlikely that the scholars who work in that area have stopped pushing the field forward to wait for you to get through the comprehensive exams.
The written comprehensive exams are usually scheduled for a Friday and Monday the weekend before the start of the new semester. You will do your major field on one day and your minor field on the other. We will try to schedule your major field for Friday and your minor field for Monday, but the order will be determined by the scheduling needs of the full set of students taking the written comprehensives on a given day. You will have eight hours to complete each part of the exam. The exam is closed book and no notes or other aids of any kind are allowed. For each of your fields you will be given five questions from which you will choose two to answer.
The exam will be graded by the appointed Doctoral Candidacy Examination Committee. The committee will usually, but not always, include the Committee Chair, and directors of the relevant tracks. It will usually take about two weeks to get the written exams graded.
Different examiners may read the exams in different ways, and it is the student's responsibility to write answers that are generally accessible and appealing across the variety of GPIS faculty. Most readers will be looking for a clear and direct answer to the question, evidence of familiarity and facility with the important literature, and an ability to integrate theory and empirical cases.
To pass the comprehensive exam, students must not receive more than one failing evaluation from a committee member.
Our goal and expectations are that every student will pass the comprehensive examination. The exam is not designed to be a barrier. It is meant to be a straightforward assessment of the student's command of their declared fields and their preparation to move on to the challenges of writing the dissertation. Nonetheless, and precisely because the exam is conceptualized as an assessment of this preparedness to move on, it plays a very important role in your doctoral education. Students who do not demonstrate an effective grasp of the relevant literature and empirics or who do not effectively and explicitly answer the questions as asked will not pass.
Students who do not pass the written portion of the exam on the first attempt will have to retake the exam in a subsequent semester. Failure on the second attempt will prevent the student from going on to write a dissertation. At the discretion of the examination committee, the failing student may be awarded the MA degree if the performance and coursework so merit, and if they do not already have a GPIS MA.
Doctoral candidates are expected to be able to communicate effectively and knowledgeably both in writing and orally. Thus, the comprehensive examinations have both a written and an oral component.
The oral portion of the comprehensive examination will take place about three weeks after the written. Three to five faculty members will administer the examination. The examiners will usually, but not necessarily, include the Director or Associate Director of GPIS and the track coordinators from the student's major and minor fields. The examination will last about one hour. Each examiner will have a chance to ask questions, but the format will often shift between relatively structured questioning and a more free-flowing discussion.
The discussion will center on the student's answers for the written exam (students may use their written exam). The scope of the exam is not, however, limited to that material. The examiners will be looking to fill in any perceived gaps in the written work, and to assess the student's facility more generally with the literature and empirical material.
Passing the oral comprehensive exam is a matter of convincing the committee members that you have an appropriate mastery of the central material of the field and are prepared to go on to focused and independent work on a dissertation. To pass, you must not receive more than one negative vote from a member of the examining committee.
Students who do not pass the oral exam will be asked to return in one month for a second oral exam. Students who do not pass on the second attempt will not be allowed to continue for the PhD.
The most important preparation for the PhD comprehensive examination is the GPIS coursework you have completed. Reviewing the notes and materials from your seminars and trying to organize it around some integrative themes is essential preparation. The following pages offer some further suggestions for effective preparation for the comprehensive examination, and for ensuring a strong examination performance.
1. Take appropriate classes
In consultation with your adviser and other faculty, be sure to select a variety of classes that will give you the broad background you need for the comprehensive exam. It is particularly important that you choose classes that will help you gain both a breadth of field knowledge, and a depth of knowledge in a few critical areas. The seminar papers you write should particularly help you develop depth in a few critical areas.
2. Keep effective class notes and reading notes
You should be thinking about preparation for the comprehensive exams from the beginning of your program. Keeping your seminar and reading notes in an organized manner will allow for more effective comprehensive exam review. You will particularly want to be careful about the material in the core classes.
You may find it useful to develop reading notes at different levels of depth. There may be a set of books and articles for which you will have 2-3 page summaries. There may be a second, larger, group for which you have paragraph length descriptions. Finally you should have a third very large group for which you have a sentence for each reading that gives you the central thrust of the argument.
3. Work on exam preparation in groups
Working with others can help you share the labor of summarizing and reviewing material. You can work with others on identifying the critical literature and on developing answers to hypothetical test questions.
4. Pay particular attention to the broad literature of international relations theory that will help you in answering a wide variety of questions
Many of the questions across the different tracks will benefit from an effective understanding of the broad currents and debates of international relations theory. One of the things a graduate education should help you do is to apply general theory to a variety of specific situations. Displaying that ability on the comprehensive exam is a good idea.
5. Identify some historical periods and important episodes and issues around which you will develop a particular expertise
Alas, no one can know everything about everything. You will see in this collection of sample questions that it is relatively rare for a question to demand knowledge of a particular event or historical period. Nonetheless, you will also see that you are often called upon to identify a critical historical period or event. You will be expected to evince in-depth knowledge of some issues or areas. Effective in-depth knowledge of a few critical issue areas or historical episodes can help you generate appropriate material for a wide variety of questions.
6. Identify some important literature with which you will be particularly familiar
You need to have a good feel for a very broad range of literature. For a lot of books and articles, remembering the author and the central thrust of their argument and evidence will serve you adequately for the comprehensives. But, just as it is essential that you have a greater depth of knowledge about a few historical episodes are critical issues, you will want to have a set of books and articles that you know extremely well. You should have an identified set of readings that you are confident you can apply to a reasonable range of questions and that you know very well and can talk about with some depth and sophistication.
7. Practice for the exam
Using the material in this booklet, you should write some practice exams. At the beginning you may want to take several hours and write an answer with open book resources. By the end you should be practicing with closed notes and a two-hour clock to simulate exam conditions. Such practice will not only help you think about how you will engage in the actual task of taking the exam, but will give you collection of sample answers that may be easily adapted to the real test questions. Just be careful that you don't mistakenly provide the answer to a similar old question and miss the slightly changed terms or requirements that are likely to show up in the real test.
The process of preparing practice exams is another area where working in groups can be extremely helpful. Having a study group can give you a larger stock of practice answers and will allow you to get feedback and to discuss the appropriate sources and arguments for a given question.
1. Make sure you answer the questions explicitly and clearly.
The most common comprehensive exam mistake is to not explicitly and clearly answer the question. Read the question very carefully and make sure that you offer an explicit answer to the question. Do not rely on the readers to draw out implicit answers.
2. Make appropriate reference to the literature and relevant scholarly debates.
You will not, of course, be expected to provide detailed citations. But, you should demonstrate familiarity and facility with a range of the literature. You should be able to appropriately reference the scholars whose arguments are relevant to a particular issue. You may occasionally include the name of a book or article and the date of its publication.
3. Make appropriate use of theory and of empirical and historical knowledge.
If appropriately done, it is particularly effective to use theory to inform answers on history questions and history to inform answers on theory questions.
4. Write full answers that are structured with an introduction and conclusion.
As in all writing, structure and organization are important to effective communication. Just because it is a time-limited exam is no excuse for jumbled, incoherent writing. Take the time to think through and outline your argument and its structure before you write. As in all writing, signposting, headings, and clear explicit language can help communicate your ideas. Provide a clear introduction and conclusion that can help you summarize your central point and will reassure the readers that you have, in fact, explicitly answered the question.
5. Make an argument
As a scholar prepared to embark on independent thesis work, it is important that you demonstrate an ability to effectively articulate your own views. The comprehensive exam is not just about knowing the literature. It is also about demonstrating that you can think about international issues critically and come to your own conclusions. Avoid wishy-washy answers that simply describe some of the ideas extant in the field and then conclude that they are all correct. Take a stand and defend it with appropriate theoretical, analytical, and empirical material.
6. Make choices
You will notice that most of the questions are a lot bigger than can be fully answered in the two-hours you will have on average during the written exam. You have to make choices on how you will answer so that you can display your breadth and depth of knowledge while satisfying the committee that you have effectively addressed the question. It usually helps if you can be explicit about how you are managing the question ("While there are, of course, idiosyncratic elements in the complex relationship of each President to his national security team, I will focus in this short essay on the difficult relationship between Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance because it effectively illuminates the problems every foreign policy team must face"). It is rarely a good strategy to try to present a broad and superficial survey of too many things ("In this essay I will discuss the relationship of each Post-WWII American president with his respective Secretaries of State and Defense").
7. Don't make big mistakes
This, of course, is common sense, but I can't overemphasize how difficult it is to certify someone as ready to move onto writing a dissertation who fundamentally misunderstands some essential literature, or who demonstrates a wanton disregard for historical accuracy.
1. Attitude matters
Attitude is important in the oral examination, just as it will be for the remainder of your career as a scholar. As a doctoral candidate, you should be able to present your views with confidence, but without becoming defensive. The examiners are likely to push against your views and expect to see you defend them effectively, but not irrationally.
The best way to figure out the right attitude is to attend the presentations of others at research workshops, dissertation defenses, and conferences. Start paying attention to the style as well as the substance. Take note of how other scholars deal with difficult questions and criticisms. What works and what doesn't work? What makes them sound defensive? What makes them sound arrogant? What makes them sound indecisive?
2. Being nervous is inevitable
It is likely that you will be nervous. How you perform when nervous is not irrelevant to your career as a scholar. You need to demonstrate that despite being nervous you can engage in appropriate scholarly discussion.
3. We probably know more than you, but knowing everything isn't required
It is likely that all together, the three to five professors conducting the examination know some things that you don't. With some pushing, they will probably be able to find out what some of those things are. We don't expect you to know everything. We do expect you to communicate effective knowledge of a broad range of subjects, and explicit and deep knowledge of a few selected areas.
4. Practice
The best way to practice for the oral exam is to speak up and engage in discussion in your seminars, in research workshops, and at conferences. If you aren't prepared to express and defend your views in the seminar setting, it is unlikely that you will be prepared to do so in the oral exam.
5. Work with other students
Again, preparing for the comprehensive examinations with other students will help you both with the substance and with the process. Scholarly discussions of exam questions with other students will give you the chance to practice articulating and defending your views with appropriate references to the literature and empirical facts.