Exams
Comprehensive Exam Dates
Fall: Second week in November on Monday & Tuesday (e.g., Fall 2024: November 11 & 12, 2024)
Spring: Fourth week in March on Monday & Tuesday (e.g., Spring 2025: March 24 & 25, 2025)
Purpose and Design of Comprehensive Exams in Ph.D. Graduate Study in Sociology
Comprehensive exams in sociology have two major purposes:
- Review the intellectual/theoretical and empirical history of a specialty area in order to be able to teach and perform research in the area with expert knowledge; move beyond the material organized in prior coursework and learn to read independently and critically as one must do as a practicing professional.
Goals: undergraduate and graduate course development in the specialty area; webinar and short course development in the specialty area; ability to conduct high impact scholarship that convinces journal editors, book editors, and reviewers of its originality, quality, and validity. - Become conversant with the primary intellectual questions in a specialty area and current empirical research on those questions in a way that enables you to speak easily and comfortably in conversation about these issues without notes or materials.
Target audiences: recruitment committees, conference panelists and attendees, journalists and policymakers, academic lecture audiences, undergraduate and graduate students in the discipline, grant site-visit reviewers.
The format can be highly variable, but should be designed to develop each student’s skills in these areas. Once students no longer take classes, they must learn to continue their education on their own—sociology has no tradition of Continuing Education or a certification system for making sure scholars are up to date in their field. Thus the habit of independent critical reading and reflection must be established in graduate school. As working professionals, students will also be asked to comment on their own work and that of others without time for deep reflection or access to scholarly materials. As such, an expert needs enough familiarity with the extant empirical literature to explain and critique available knowledge at any time to those who might question their work or that of others. This might require some memorization and suggests time or consultation limits on exams.
The purpose of comprehensive exams is not to "weed out" anyone from Ph.D. study or establish a difficult hurdle to overcome in order to prove one’s worthiness, as some students may believe. The primary purpose is to certify on the basis of performance that the candidate has sufficient breadth and depth of knowledge to be let out into the world to teach and instruct others as a designated UT-trained “expert” in their area of sociology. As such, the exam is a developmental exercise designed to take each students’ skills to their highest level by creating the space and time for critical reflection on an entire field before narrowing their focus to their dissertation research question(s). We therefore strongly encourage students to take readings hours and minimize other endeavors during the time they spend preparing for the exam.
Most areas accomplish these goals by dividing the comprehensive exam into a part 1 concentrating on an overview of the entire specialty area, and a part 2 concentrating on the specific prior work in the area of the student’s dissertation in order to maximize the impact of the student’s doctoral research. The part 1 reading list should give the student the opportunity to cover enough contemporary research in specialty and generalist journals to design and implement a graduate or undergraduate course in the substantive area. The part 2 reading list should ensure that the student is well-versed in all necessary strains of contemporary scholarship to successfully undertake their dissertation research.
Students must make an appointment to audit their program of work with the graduate program administrator prior to taking comprehensive exams.
Exam templates by area
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Exam preparation timeline and notes example
Tips from faculty and students