Comprehensive Exam Strategy of Ph.D students

Comprehensive Examinations Strategy Guide: 


The comprehensive exam (comps) is one of the most challenging part of the Ph.D. The goal of the comprehensive exam is often to have the student develop a depth of knowledge with regard to their research topic  and a breadth of knowledge with regard to their field. It takes many forms and the requirements for a successful completion varies widely. At the University of Toronto for example, the process and evaluation procedure are different for each department. Some departments even have no comprehensive exam what so ever (lucky), but they have qualifying exams (same thing).

With that said, I believe the strategy outlined below could help those who are feeling hesitant when starting their own comps or are feeling overwhelmed when looking at all the work ahead. Importantly, this strategy will also help beyond the completion of your comprehensive exams when writing research articles and developing research oriented or topic presentations.

Regardless of the format of your comps, if it requires reading and synthesizing a bunch of research articles, texts you will find this method useful.


Start Reading and Make Notes Right Away. 
First of all,  I was not a good note taker before my comps, and I still would not consider myself a good note taker. However, I am constantly practicing and getting better at it. I decided to make notes after reading through this article 3 times and not remembering a thing when asked to talk about it after the first day of my comps process. That was my wake up call. Through some research on note-taking methods, and discussions with colleagues, I developed the strategy described below.

The Note Taking Process

• Start Reading and take notes as you read. Highlight the important points and try to make a skeleton of the information presented. This is particularly useful for introduction and discussion sections of research articles. 
• Make your notes complete (or complete-ish) sentences and highlight important details in the article or text 

Below is an example for how this was done for the introduction of Coello and Magne, 2000

• For research articles and texts: note, highlight, or even redraw key figures. Write your own description underneath. 
• Below is an example of what this looks like for Rozzi et al., 2008

• Here is what this looks like for a textbook section 

• Make your notes as detailed as possible at this point. The goal is to create something that you can understand later without re-reading the article, be creative with it and personalize it to your style. 

I found that making notes helped me feel like I accomplished something during the days where I was expected to just study and gave me something that was a little bit more tangible.

The Studying process: 
Once you make notes, and get the ideas out of the articles and texts and unto page(s). The crucial step of getting these ideas from the page into your head begins. For this step, you could just reread your notes a bunch of times, but I found that actively working with the material  was a more effective way making me remember what I read about. Studying this way also had a bonus effect that is detailed below.

Create a Summary 
**Note** This is by far the most useful thing I did for my comprehensive examination preparation. 

• Once you have your notes, the next thing to do is create a well written summary of the article or text you have read. To do this, read over your notes on each section and draft a summary of the article. Include key details and observations you have noted in the summary that may not be present in the abstract. Write the summary as if you are writing it for a proposal or as background for a presentation. 

Here is an example of a summary of  Coello and Magne, 2000

Here is a summary of a textbook section

The practice of summarizing the article in your own words will help it stick in your memory, and these summaries will also come in handy when writing your own proposals and research articles in the future. Importantly, producing these summaries will also force you to write which is a skill you can never practice enough.

Create a Presentation
In the same way, for larger review papers and tougher material, I found it was also helpful to create a simple presentation outlining and explaining the concept. This presentation could be in the form of a lecture (for larger text book readings and reviews) or a simple 10-minute research presentation (for tough research articles). I found that this method helped me realize what topics I didn't know as well and what I should focus on studying. Also this practice and left me with a bunch of presentations and outlines I could pull from when required to  for lab meetings and even when planning lectures for classes.

The Synthesizing Process
Once you have mostly learned all the individual pieces of information, it is important to synthesize and look for contrasts between groups of literature. This will help you develop a feel for the state of the literature in the field and with regard to your topic of interest. It is important however to do this in the way your will be evaluated.

Practice How You Are Going to Be Tested
For my comprehensive exams, I was required to write three, 10 page papers in 10 days based on a question from each of my 4 committee members. So for the last month or so of my comps, I practiced writing papers based on questions I gave myself. This was tough. It was a grind, and it was hard to even think about doing it. I lost motivation the first time I tried, but I was glad that I tried. When it came to the real thing, and I actually got the questions I was able to at least finish the answers. If you know how you will be evaluated- fortify yourself and practice that way. You never want to run your 10K on race day.

Create a Topic Lecture (I wish I did more of these)
I had the idea of creating a lecture for each theme covered in my comprehensive examinations. There were 4 global themes and I was able to spend some time making one of them into a lecture. I wish I had done this for all 4 because the one theme I actually did it for became the easiest theme to write about.

Overall thoughts
The comprehensive exam process was tough, but I am glad I finished it. In the end I was left with this knowledge to share with others and a whole bunch of notes and summaries I later used to write my thesis. For those of you wondering how I organized this, I used a tool called evernote. I attached the article, wrote notes and then did the summary in the same note. Here is what it looks like. It was easy for me to look for articles by keyword and find what I needed to. I do think you should choose and organizational tool that works for you.


Good luck y'all :-)