My PhD qualifying exam was a nightmare but I'm not letting it define me | Hacker News Reader

My PhD qualifying exam was a nightmare but I'm not letting it define me

science.org

18 pointsbkohlmann31 comments

The author is absolutely correct that the ability to pass the PhD qualifying exam should not define them as a person or their self worth. A PhD is just a different career choice not very dissimilar to becoming a musician.

But the qualifying exam sounded like it did its job the way it was supposed to! The author was given multiple opportunities to pass a fairly clear bar of academic competence to hold the highest and thus the most difficult to attain qualification in the world, and they failed every time. From how it’s written I see no indication of prejudice due to their gender or ethnicity, or of any wrong doing. They were just not good enough at doing what was expected of them at this stage.

Arguments such as “they asked questions outside of my topic” sound moot because that’s the expectation here! You’re supposed to have a reasonable breadth of knowledge in your field! And now if someone asked a question you had never thought about, that’s unfair? For a PhD qualifying exam?

I’m not blaming the author for any of this though, the pattern and idea that a PhD should be achievable by anyone regardless of their intellectual abilities has been taking root for a long time coming. The professors don’t want to fight it because this is the only way they get free cheap labor, except when they lament about in the drop in abilities in the new generation.

I also don’t completely buy into the narrative that educated families make a difference in your PhD performance. The only corollary is succeeding in a PhD typically correlated with how _stable_ your personal life is. Privilege in socioeconomic terms that provides safety nets and support systems absolutely do make a large difference and should be afforded to all the candidates. But even if your dad had a PhD, unless it’s in the exact same topic, nobody’s getting help practicing for their quals.

it’s saddening but was inevitable that institutions would just do away with important requirements than fight with such appeals but given my general disdain for present day academia, I’m excited to see where the whole system goes as more such nails are driven into its coffin.

Yeah, it's one thing for a kid unfamiliar with rigorous academic culture to be shell shocked during undergraduate school. I certainly was, and it was a long slog for me with plenty of scars and a below average academic record to show for it. (And as not a member of a favored minority group, the system was much more merciless--you don't get the benefit of white privilege at those elite levels unless you can at least walk and talk the part, and from those heights there's nary a difference between poor black or latino kids and poor white kids in terms of how they come across, and plenty of minority students who could play the part much better than I ever could.) But by the time you hit graduate school the rules of the game are clear; even if you're still not proficient in understanding how you're supposed to approach and regurgitate the material, the expectations should be abundantly clear, as well as the dilemmas academia faces which motivate those rules. Perhaps the problem here is that her undergraduate program had already been watered down too much, which is particularly shameful for a program in the hard sciences. My studies were on the other half of campus--liberal arts and then the law, the requirements of which are in some ways more inscrutable, but admittedly often less rigorous, at least in undergraduate.

FWIW, I often don't do well with scholarly vocabulary, either. I often like to do deep dives into historical material, and the vocabulary shifts over time, even over the course of a decade or less. So while I was often much more well read than any other student, I'd often use terms with more archaic definitions in mind, which could make me sound like an imbecile. (Ditto regarding concepts as the textbook delineations are always fuzzier for me having read various primary sources which progressed across time to give a concept it's modern shape. I understood that modern shape, but it takes so much more effort to articulate clearly as you're struggling to suppress and mask out the inherent complexity.) I'm also a stutterer, which means I often sound like an imbecile from the first moment someone hears me stutter.

My guess is that you don't have a PhD and didn't go through such a qualifying exam.

> I also don’t completely buy into the narrative that educated families make a difference in your PhD performance.

Your parents or people around you having a PhD makes a massive difference! Because they can tell you what to do if your advisor doesn't.

Most students who still need to deal with this system (most departments moved decades ago to written exams or to largely proforma quals) don't know that you need to: 1. Pick a committee based on their likelihood to pass you, not on their closeness to your field. The world is sadly full of assholes who want to prove a point. 2. Choose people who your don't want to screw over your advisor for some reason. It's important to ask your advisor "Oh, by chance, does X happen to hate your guts?" Because.. academic politics are nasty. 3. Choose an advisor with some pull, so that they can keep people in line.

All of these fields are so complicated with so many intricacies that if I want to fail any student, no matter how brilliant they are, rest assured I can easily ask questions that will lead to failure. This includes students who are much smarter than me.

I have guided many of my own students through this system. If you think your chances of success depend only on your ability and not your insider knowledge, well, you're wrong.

Also, on behalf of this poor student. This is not her failure. It is the failure of her advisor. Who was negligent for creating the conditions that lead to failure. Her advisor should have rehearsed her talk, her group should have grilled the student on related questions, and if the committee was asking totally inappropriate unrelated questions her advisor should have stepped in.

> Most students who still need to deal with this system don't know that you need to...

In my program everyone knew these things. Because we talked to each other. Our individual backgrounds didn't matter so much because we were really in it together in many ways. I didn't pass my prelim (what most people call "qual", I think) because my parents taught me (they didn't) or my advisor was competent (he was, but he was also even more distracted). I passed because the previous years of students told us how to do it, and we told each other.

> if I want to fail any student, no matter how brilliant they are, rest assured I can

This I agree with.

> This is not her failure. It is the failure of her advisor. Who was negligent

And this I strongly agree with. We all knew in my program that if someone failed their prelim or orals, it was because their advisor dropped the ball. Badly. (At least, it would have been bad if it had ever actually happened....)

Yeah the only valid point OP made is that a student failing prelims is a failure of the professor but that doesn’t mean we should let the student continue to fail upwards?

Those are 3 very important pieces of advice.

I have a PhD. In fact it took me close to a decade. I was an immigrant and knew no one in the entire country. In fact my first year I didn’t even know the language! No one in my family was super educated though my father was an incredibly thoughtful smart person. I don’t think he helped me with anything academically since maybe 7th grade though.

Over the journey I made most of my friends so almost all of my friends have a PhD or quit one midway (coincidentally the smart ones quit if you ask me). My experience is that people who complain about quals like this should not be doing a PhD. Failing them at Quals is at least somewhat forgiving compared to wasting half a decade of their life.

The author was given multiple opportunities to pass a fairly clear bar of academic competence to hold the highest and thus the most difficult to attain qualification in the world, and they failed every time.

Exactly. If everyone could attain a PhD there would be no point to having a PhD because it wouldn't tell other people anything about your level of knowledge and competence.

Qualifying exams are somewhat arbitrary. In some universities they are serious and a large portion of the students fail; in some they are basically a formality and everyone already knows each other and if the student isn't ready the examiners just delay. Also what constitutes "academic competence" is up to the examiners who may be biased.

But IMO this is not a major issue, because I do think for the most part academia still maintains high and fair standards: a majority of examiners have good judgement, and a vast majority of universities will not give a PhD to someone who is not PhD worthy.

The fundamental issue with quals, though, is that they are just a really bad way of gauging academic knowledge. Professors should be able to and already do tell if a student is PhD worthy based on everything they've accomplished in grad school: the papers they've published and their thesis. Also, some people do really bad thinking and speaking under pressure, and while that makes them terrible presenters, I don't think it makes them unworthy of a PhD: you can be a terrible presenter but still write great papers and be able to thoroughly communicate your expertise in casual conversation. To me it seems like the one-hour qualifying exam is just an unnecessary stress: at best it reaffirms what the student and advisor already knew, and in the cases I've heard where it doesn't it often turns out there was a serious problem somewhere in the PhD process (you could argue that the qual's purpose is to detect that problem, but then it just becomes a formality again).

What? Quals come well before the thesis and sometimes years before first author publications depending on the field.

Exactly, the PhD is a kind of participation trophy at some point. Quals are the last simple way to decide that someone will not get a PhD.

You make many valid points and I want to address some of them here: 1. My belief of what a qualifying exam is that it’s almost the only time an external expert, someone not the advisor, gets an opportunity to gauge the readiness of the student for a PhD. You are correct that a competent unbiased advisor will already know if the student is ready for a PhD but the two adjectives in this sentence make the case for why independent external evaluation is needed in such a case. I worked with advisors who eventually became antagonistic to my interests and I depended on the quals and viva exams to make sure they don’t screw me over. I also lived through multiple generations of PhD students going through this lab via many universities and grad programs, and every program with lax quals only enabled advisors to have outsized influence on the students future (either for better or worse). So hopefully I have made the case for why external evaluation is necessary.

With that convinced, let’s then ask how best can external evaluators gauge a PhD student? Written work might not work since you can never tell how much help they had. In fact I feel you can never trust anything that is “take home” Because at the graduate level it’s hard to evaluate an individuals’ contribution to a piece of research. Which only becomes harder in the more collaborative environments of today! So I’ll be curious what you think the solution here is if viva exams are not equitable.

2. You are correct that some people don’t do well under the time pressure of things like quals. But unless there’s a viable solution for problem 1 above, i feel this is an acceptable compromise. This is not an exam where it’s determined you get basic rights, it’s an exam to choose elite members of a society that should be meritoriously selective. And as grueling tests go this seems the lightest! Just an hour of grilling by 4 people in closed doors, and you get Multiple chances and infinite time to prepare! How much simpler can it get?

Further, how sure are we that this skill doesn’t indirectly transfer to their future career? You are correct that phds can be productive without ever talking to another human being but doesn’t mean this skill isn’t important or helpful. This is like asking the navy seals training to become less strenuous because it could exclude people and maybe because carrying logs doesn’t directly apply to their future career! I’d argue it does tangentially help and given the lack of alternative testing methods this seems perfectly acceptable.

I passed Ph.D. qualifying exams in mathematics after failing them the first time. Almost everyone in my family has a college degree and this fact helped me not one bit since none of them can understand graduate level mathematics. Being a first generation college student is not an excuse for doing poorly on Ph.D. qualifying exams. You know the material or you don’t and it’s highly unlikely people in your family will relate to that specific set of knowledge.

Sounds to me like the author doesn’t know the material well enough. Take the hint and change careers.

These exams seem somewhat silly in my view. If a professor believes one is capable of research, and one has built relationships/track record with the professors through coursework. Then why would the university fail out a student on an oral examination? It seems like using leetcode to determine promotions.

Because a single professor sponsorship is not good enough for such a degree. But why do a PhD if you dont like the rules, I dont have one and I'm happy, productive, married, rich enough...

The problem with leetcode is that it favors leet coders, but if that s what a company wants Ill apologize and say Im a dumb average dev who cant cast arrays into integers in javascript on the top of my head or whatnot, and move on.

Professors have motivations beyond ensuring that the a potential student is capable. For instance, sometimes they need bodies to pad resumes or look good for a promotions committee. A person with a Ph.D. should have an expert level of knowledge in their field. If a student can’t pass an examination after 3 tries then, in my opinion, it’s time to move on.

Would you want as your ER doctor someone who couldn’t pass the USMLE? At some point one has to be able to prove they know material like you and I know 1+1 is 2.

Exactly, maybe the examination is a sign. I get the fact that circumstances can change maybe 1 examination, but 3 times in a row?

You should be doing the doctorate because it interests you, to select a career you need something that interests you, something that you're good at, and something that pays. Going to the career for only one of them isn't good enough.

I don't understand how "Black Lives Matter" and "BlackInTheIvory" is related to the content of this all. Why is this in there?

This reads like it was generated by ChatGPT with "Write a sad story about PhD qualifying exams but sprinkle in references to social movements about racial inequality"

I got my PhD from a department with a strict qualifying exam (less than 50% pass rate). It was a tragic system that served no purpose.

There were dozens of students who were clearly able to do research. Who had publications in top tier conferences and journals. But they had difficulties passing the qualifying exam (exams were based on courses which changed all the time, it was easy to be extremely good at say computer architecture but get a few oddball questions out in left field about some minutia you've never seen before).

The real consequence of the system was that it discriminated against people who didn't understand it. You had to know to pick the right classes, to time it for the right year (where enough senior faculty had students who needed to pass it ASAP so that it would be easier). And of course, senior faculty with connections pulled strings to get their students past the exam.

At my university now we thankfully don't do this insanity. Qualifying for the PhD is what it is supposed to be: can you publish? Ok, then show us a publication and defend it. Now let's talk about what you'll be doing for the rest of your PhD.

The comments here are too harsh. The emotional journey of failing high stakes exams and the helplessness of the closest people around you not knowing what it feels like is such an emotional roller-coaster. I mean, I failed too many technical interviews last year, and I am still heavily drained by that.

Let's have more empathy to the author. 99% of us could all have bad streaks of exams/interviewing/fundraising rounds at some point in our life. Let's not let these setbacks define us.

> I even stopped doing lab work to focus on my exam preparations.

This is the main drawback of the qualifier circus. PhD students waste 2-3 years preparing for this arbitrary and nightmarish rite of passage, time that they could have started their research.

I am glad that that particular department decided to do away with the exam. It is better to define a subset of core courses, and just use the GPA in these courses as a qualifier for formal admission into PhD candidacy. This will help the students gain the candidacy in parallel with the coursework rather than sink enormous amounts of additional time into an exam.

Hard disagree on dropping quals. Quals were one of the only times where we were forced challenged to reexamine our ideas from a reasonably outside perspective, both to see that we actually knew the material and that we could work outside our little niche. This also happens in the group, at conferences, etc but quals are one of the only institutional opportunities to enforce outside perspective.

Part of the point of the PhD is learning how to approach problems that have no established solution, and someone who lacks breadth or depth will likely find it challenging to be a professional researcher.

What was the point of this article?

To save everyone a click, the author failed the qualifying exam for the PhD program thrice and got kicked out. Article ends with her advisor petitioning for her to be reinstated to the program.

Agreed, I'm sure it was a difficult experience and I can empathize with that, but there's just no real takeaway.

The bar wasn’t lowered, it was removed altogether.

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Remarkably content-free article written by a thrice-rejected newly accepted PhD candidate at Northeastern University. What does this article seek to do? Does it Persuade? About what? Inform? That the author is a 'first-generation Afro-Latinx'? Check. That the bar was the same as every other one of the hundreds of grad schools in the nation, and then it was removed, so she can now proceed to research and the final defense? Check.

It is of course not true in general, but I feel that it is now de rigueur for authors to inject race and hyphenated identities into practically everything they write, sadly reducing them to caricatures. It is difficult to take such writing seriously.

Indeed, failing quals doesn't define her - as you can see from her resume and works like this, it's far more important she is "an Afro-Latinx first-generation college graduate". I'm sure she will go on to enjoy immense professional success.

First the unrelated concepts argument. It's generally hard to know if a concept is related to your research without understanding it or knowing about it. Then there's the dunning kruger effect where we overestimate our own abilities. It's likely that there was a tangential link and the author failed to see it. Ironically her failure to see the relation possibly led to a poor impression.

The argument of not having family members to talk about research is absurd because you always have some colleagues talking shop.

The language argument fails because every year many immigrant students with English as a second language take the same exams and do well.

To add insult to injury, the job market for humanities PhDs has cratered.

See https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/what-sh...

I am really curious what the person writing this article thinks people will take away from it is. You failed three oral exams but were let through anyway because meritocracy has gone of out of fashion. Ok. I guess the article is just a slice of life piece for this magazine but its almost like it was generated by a right-wing ragebait factory to drum up racial tensions and anti-academic sentiment.

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