ABC’s OF STUDY FOR PHD QUALIFYING EXAMINATIONS
Getting started with exam study: first determine the members of your committees in conjunction with your advisor. Refer to the Graduate Handbook at each phase for helpful information on procedures and requirements.
SCHEDULING EXAMS
This should take place at the beginning of the semester in which you are taking your exams. Usually a week between exams is required in order that all of the examiners have time to read the exam (given other obligations they may have) and report back to the chair of the committee, which if a majority is in favor means the next exam is authorized to take place. If your other examiners agree to a shorter turnaround time, you could squeeze it to a 5-day week (ie M/F/W or Th/T/M). Dates for all written and oral exams are set up in advance (with the assumption all will go well!). The only day that all committee members need to be physically present, or available via Skype, is that of the oral. So usually, you need to work back from that date. Contact Michele well in advance to determine that the room is available to be reserved for your proposed dates.
FORMULATING THE FIELDS
Field descriptions should be short and concise and avoid being proscriptive. What you are setting, in conjunction first with your advisor and then with the committee members, are the parameters of chronology, place, and media, with indication of your particular thrust or thematic focus. The Broad field should aim to cover the territory of an upper-level course in your field; the Special field should provide the background study for the area of your dissertation research.
INITIAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES
The initial “hunting and gathering” phase is also an organizing phase. Using a Bibliography database program, such as Zotero or RefWorks (both free, the latter through Temple library), is recommended if not already in use. Begin by including what you know, particularly course bibliographies. You will be surprised by how much material you have already. This is also a good moment to gain the experience of your peers who have been through the process, and form study groups with those in your cohort to compare notes and provide morale checks. In the broadest sense, what you are trying to do is to master the content that will enable you to teach and research in your chosen fields. You will be assessing the state of your fields, who are the past and current authorities, what are the important themes and ideas, what are the critical artists and works. You will need to manage your time as your study progresses, learning to scan for importance and to simply note or dig more deeply. Utilize your own past annotations of material, reviews, and other assessment tools to build your bibliography in a meaningful way. Meet with your advisor and committee members to discuss your bibliographies as you build them. Organized like conventional alphabetically-ordered bibliographies, they can continue to be added to and become a vital future resource for your dissertation and teaching.
SECTIONED TOPICAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Now that you have created these general bibliographies for each field, it is time to implement some strategic approaches. With such a large amount of material, you want to sort out the truly relevant scholarship for various topics within each field (and/or that are shared). For exam purposes, create topical sub-bibliographies for each field that are organized chronologically. These might include more general categories (historiography, standard histories of the field), major artists/monuments, to more specialized categories identifying key themes/issues. It is most useful to organize these by date, earliest to most recent, so you get the shape of the historiography on each issue just by looking at them.
Here you can identify the key players who have shaped the state of the question for the different issues, concentrating on who shifts the field and less on those who reiterate or follow except as indicating the importance of an issue or new pieces of evidence or interpretation that further a particular direction. You want to know about everything relevant, but that doesn't necessarily mean paying an equal amount of attention. Reviews can be particularly useful for such assessments. When you have assembled a list of your potential topics, it will help you to see where you have holes or are already quite well-covered so you know what to concentrate on. It will also help your committee to make suggestions in particular areas, moreover, it is part of the dialogue that will go towards shaping exam questions. Indeed, that is one way to think about the topics, as the subjects you think form the important questions for your fields.
How you might practically think of these sections for the Broad field is as the weekly or bi-weekly topics of an upper-level course; for the Special field as the weekly topics for a graduate seminar on your field. That also gives you some sense of the number of topics you might need for each (14-16 week semester!). Some may be sub-sections of a larger topic.
For each exam field what you want to emerge is the overall state-of-the-field and important issues (what are the current 'hot-button' topics? what used to be the preoccupations of the field, and have those been transformed/ retired/ ready for a comeback?). Who has shaped and is shaping each topic? What are the histories of the state of each question? Highlight those who changed the direction and note under them those who followed. What are the camps for big questions? Who has shaped the discourse? Inside or outside? Exhibitions are often weathervanes so attentiveness to their subjects and impact can be revealing . You will find that you repeat works according to their relevance in multiple categories, also revealing.
By their nature, such topically-organized bibliographies will incur a lot of cross-over. A bibliography database makes it very easy to generate these sub-lists. Otherwise, there is always cutting and pasting! It is a good way for your committee members to identify any major gaps in topics to be addressed, or key bibliography.
SAMPLE QUESTIONS AND MOCK TESTING
Writing up sample questions for each section and practice test-taking will be the next stage. When you develop your thematic sections in your bibliographies, you are laying out the important themes and questions for your fields. As you develop these sections in conjunction with your examiners, next start to actually frame them as questions that you would imagine potentially answering on an exam. Discuss these with your advisor and committee to see how well you are on track. As your exams approach, do some practice questions with a strict timed setting to see how long it takes when you are writing out your answers.
PERFORMING THE EXAMINATIONS
Preparation and organization are key to your written exam success. Safeguard your stamina with proper sleep and energize with good nourishment, plan ahead. First of all, calculate your total time for the exam, subtract from that an amount of time at the beginning to outline all the questions, and at the end to go back to any question, a lunch break, and divide the remainder of time up by the total number of questions, then strictly adhere to the amount of time available per question. This also means you will need to be efficient and targeted in your responses because you will know a lot more than there is time to expound upon. Make sure that you address the questions asked. Indicate as completely as possible the authorities that you invoke. If there are relevant directions that time does not permit you to explore, then so indicate (and these may be taken up in the oral). Above all, consider that this is not simply an exercise but an expression of your accumulated knowledge and critical apprehension where you take your place in your chosen field. The oral may extend points from questions answered, take up questions you did not choose to answer, or utilize images or literature to raise related issues. Revel in what you know and how you have learned to think about your field. Your faculty is looking for you to demonstrate your expertise to welcome you as a future colleague.
NB: Run any and all questions by your own advisor FIRST!
Dr. Tracy E. Cooper, Professor
Art History, Temple University