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An Advisor's Guide to the Oral Qual

The oral qualifying exam is part of the process by which a student becomes a doctoral candidate. It is one of the means by which the faculty formally evaluate a student's readiness and ability to pursue a course of original research leading to a doctoral thesis. (The other means are the breadth courses and the written portfolio.)

Students complete their oral qual prior to the portfolio review, typically 18 months to two years after entering the doctoral program. Advanced students may be able to complete this milestone sooner.

To pass the oral qual, a student must give a polished oral presentation of roughly half an hour on an area of CSE research, using current literature as the source material. The presentation is made to a committee of at least three faculty members, *not* including the advisor, who evaluate both the presentation and the student's response to questions about the area being presented. With questions, the oral qual typically runs ninety minutes.

The basis of the student's presentation is a collection of papers (typically three of them) that describe approaches to source research area. The student should understand these papers thoroughly, be aware of their connections to prior and related work in the area, and be able to synthesize a picture of the state of research in the area using these papers and related readings as evidence. The final goal is the synthesis, not merely recapitulation of the chosen papers; indeed, the listeners should be able to understand the research area from the talk without detailed prior knowledge of the papers.

Some examples of topics that might be suitable for an oral qual:

• "Making Interprocedural Static Analysis Tractable for Large Programs"
• "Algorithms for Near-Neighbor Search in High Dimensional Spaces"
• "Hardware Acceleration of Routing Tables in High Speed Routers"
• "Using Sequence Alignments to Constrain Gene Structure Prediction"
• "Bandwidth-Efficient Delivery of On-Demand Multicast Video"

Students typically spend one to three months preparing for the exam. While exam preparation is important and does require nontrivial effort, it need not dominate the student's time to the exclusion of other work. One way to make exam preparation less of a distraction is to choose a topic in the same general area as the student's own research project (e.g. network design, biosequence analysis, digital video), so that time spent preparing for the exam also advances the student's training.

At the beginning of the oral qual process, a student's advisor participates heavily in selecting the qual topic, the examining committee, and the specific papers to be studied. Ideally, the student and advisor will collaborate in fixing these aspects of the exam. Once formed, the examining committee should also have input into the choice of papers.

Once the parameters of the exam are fixed, it is recommended that the advisor limit direct involvement in the student's preparation for the exam. While each advisor will likely have a different notion of what constitutes "limited" involvement, the intent is that each student's exam be representative of her individual skills and understanding of the area. Also, having the student take ultimate responsibility for understanding the area builds confidence and may encourage deeper investigation.

Given that many students are working in an area only because of their advisor's influence, it is clearly impossible to draw a bright line of separation between the student's innate ability and the advisor's input. Even so, here are some suggestions as to what might be considered "limited" involvement:

• Be willing to field technical questions about points in individual papers, but try to let the student formulate the synthesis and draw connections between the papers.
• Broadly assist the student's preparation by identifying some of the key questions about the area, but do not "coach" the student to provide the "right" canned answers.
• Encourage the student to do practice talks for her peers. A practice talk for the advisor is appropriate, particularly to provide the student with early feedback on her presentation skills, but avoid scheduling multiple talks for the advisor with detailed feedback on the research topic from each talk.

The examining committee must include at least three CSE faculty members. Because the advisor is not present at the exam, it is recommended that one of the committee members (preferably the chair) be prepared to act as advocate for the student. Advocacy includes ensuring that the committee asks appropriate questions and that the student is being judged fairly, even if not all members of the committee are expert in the subject area.

The advisor may wish to confer with the advocate prior to the exam, and to send the committee a brief emailed statement indicating how much assistance the student had in preparing for the exam.

If, in the opinion of the committee, a student has demonstrated good communication skills and an understanding of the target research area, the student passes the exam. Otherwise, the committee may fail the student, with or without the option to retake the exam. Because the oral exam is required for candidacy, failure without the option to retake is equivalent to recommending that a student leave the program.

The committee should always consider asking a student to retake the oral exam as a viable option. If this option is exercised, the committee should provide specific, constructive feedback as to what aspects of the exam need to be improved for the student to pass. The committee chair should also report the committee's concerns to the student's advisor.

A retake should ideally be carried out within a month of the original exam. The committee for the retake should include at least one member from the previous exam, plus one new member who was not present at the previous exam.