Articles on Doctoral Qualification Examination

There are different forms of doctoral qualification examinations in humanities and social sciences, and there is only one way to prepare: study, study desperately. Of course, this is nonsense. Everyone knows that they need to read books. The problem lies in the twists and turns between reading and writing answers.

Qualification Examination System of York Politics Department

Most Canadian politics departments follow a similar tradition, with students choosing two subjects to take exams in several areas, including political theory, comparative politics, international relations, women's or gender politics, and Canadian politics. The subjects of the qualification test are related to future job hunting. Which subject to take means "at least what can you teach?" Based on this premise, and other departments gradually tend to decide the reading scope and test questions based on the research topic jointly by students and supervisors. Most political departments in Canada still take the route of unified test bibliography and unified questioning for all students. As for whether the bibliography is related to your research, the industry does not care.

Before the pandemic, the York Politics Institute was one of the few in Canada that allowed candidates to sit in the same classroom and write together for five to seven hours. At that time, they were almost unwilling to accept the offer because of this test method . Fortunately, the epidemic seemed to permanently change the qualification examination system of the York Politics Department. After several struggles , take home was finally settled. After receiving the questions at 9:00 on Tuesday morning, students can write three questions until 4:00 pm on Thursday for the major field; two questions for the minor field, handed in at 4:00 pm on Wednesday, and each answer is between 2,500 and 3,000 words. If students pre-apply for various reasons, they can get an extra 24 hours each. If you do not do well in the exam, the exam committee decides to let you fail and give you an oral exam.

However, the take home qualification test does not mean that it becomes easier, (for me) at most it becomes "feasible".

The qualification examination of the Department of Politics in York cooperates with the course system. The first and second graders need to choose two one-year core courses, and all the reading content in the spring when the core courses end. If it is not a book a week, counting papers, there are about 12 to 15 papers a week, and 24 weeks in a school year. The qualification test is to generate answers to two to three questions from more than 250 papers in total. This design turns the core course into a cram school. The core course arranges two to four different professors to teach different subtopics. Everyone discusses the reading content for three hours every week. Some professors can lead interesting discussions, but half of the professors follow the route of drawing key points. Regardless of this or that, the truth is that it is not helpful for the "examination" itself.

For exams and so on, I only believed in notes since I was a child.

Hundreds of thousands of words of crazy notes

Looking back now, if I were a native speaker, I might have prepared differently, but it’s hard to say. My method seems time-consuming and clumsy. After the test results and the professor’s feedback and comments came out, it seemed to prove to be effective.

Because of my spelling dyslexia and my old age, I couldn’t write down any English content, so my notes were quite detailed. In addition to writing down the thesis, theoretical framework, and arguments of the article, I also provided a detailed summary of the article. However, in order to avoid thinking about how to rewrite it during the exam, I will try to record it in other words when taking notes. The page number is also clearly marked to facilitate the writing of the citation format during the exam.

Every time I finish writing a note, I will make a summary for the paper myself, and simply write my understanding of the article and what the article is discussing at the top of the note. I must say that this is a very critical action. I used a sentence from a certain classroom professor who happened to read my notes: When I prepare for XX weeks, I can recall what I read this week by reading your summary once. The same goes for preparing for exams.

In the first year, I chose to major in comparative politics. I thought it had something to do with authority/democracy, but York took the neo-Marxist route. Last semester, I was reading political and economic theories that I was not familiar with. I cried every day while reading, and had a discussion with two other girls in the class. During the discussion, the three women hugged each other and cried. In this case, it is conceivable that I can’t write the summary. I have to ask my husband to revise the completed notes (mainly to rewrite the grammar of the sentences). If he understands my notes, he will write the summary according to the contents of the notes;

The entire note-taking project was quite time-consuming. In the first semester, I had to prepare TA seminars and elective courses. I could only take half of the notes every week. In the second semester, because my father passed away and went back to Pingtung for several months, the elective courses were given up.

In the second year, the matter of taking notes is considered easy, and the abstract of the article is more concise.

However, the notes are just notes. Although I add my own understanding of the article in the summary part, this understanding is a single article. How to connect the articles? The original class discussion of the core class was to help students master the mastery. However, in the first year, I never read all the articles in a week, so I was completely ignorant during the class discussion. It was not until I finished the notes at the end of April and listened to the recording of the class discussion that I felt enlightened.

In the second year, I minored in Canadian Politics. Except for the constitutional government and the judicial system, I was very familiar with other topics (thanks to the first-year courses, I can say that I was able to study Canadian political economy in the second year). Although I still couldn’t finish all the articles every week, I could already let several articles "dialogue" in my mind while reading, so I added more connections between the articles in the second-year notes.

Prepare for a test

Preparing for comparative politics in the first year (major) and Canadian politics in the second year (minor) can be said to be two completely different levels of pressure. For the major, you have to choose three questions out of eight (four themes, two questions for each theme, and three answers from different themes). There is almost no room for error. You have to prepare for all four themes.

In order to quickly find the article to be discussed in the exam (the professor’s expectation is to use at least six articles to discuss each question), I made another MAP and condensed the notes of the original articles into Background (such as where did the debate come from?), Argument, Includes (article theory, topics, keywords), notes (relationship with other articles), and conclusion (if the author challenges the old statement, what is the suggestion?) several sub-items, depending on the content of each article. In the first year, the MAP was nearly 40,000 words, all of which were placed in the same Word file.

There are two advantages of writing such a round before the exam: one is that you can thoroughly review and rethink each article before the exam, and the other is that you can see the questions during the exam, search keywords in the file, and all related articles can be seen at a glance.

In the second year, I only took two questions, and the two professors in the class had a high repetition rate of archaeological questions, so I shamelessly gave up the most boring judicial and constitutional system (I even went back to Taiwan for two weeks to celebrate the Lunar New Year when I got to this topic), and did MAP, but I didn’t rethink it like I did in the first year, but directly summarized the original notes (only 65% ​​of the articles had notes). After completing one round, seeing that there was still time, I took out the archaeological questions, picked out the most repetitive questions of the fourth and fifth questions, and wrote down a detailed outline of about 1,500 words for each question. The final exam questions really hit me one or two, and it was very easy to write (?).

However, although complete notes are very practical, they also have blind spots: I rely on the notes very much, and once I finish the notes, I don’t want to see the article itself again. In other words, if I misunderstood or missed something at the first time, and my husband failed to catch it when revising, then a mistake will be formed, and the comments received after the major exam will be pointed out that a certain article is misunderstood.

answer questions

As mentioned above, the subject test examiners are the professors who teach the core courses. Each professor has his own ideal way of answering the questions. Before the test, the students nervously arranged extra time for the professors to chat with us about how to write the answers. However, for me, the more we talked, the more nervous and confused we became.

However, no matter whether the professor cares about breadth or depth, my personal principle for answering questions is just like what I told my students: first write an article with a clear argument , then even if you don’t really hit the topic, your grades will not be too bad. And this principle was also confirmed in the later comments.

In practice, even if it is take home, the exam time is still very tight, and there is not much time to think about it. The thesis statement should be pointed out in the first paragraph . Later, I realized that the easiest way is to reinterpret the question in the preface and directly lead to the main argument. The following answers follow this interpretation.

For example, in this test of Canadian politics, there is a question:

The 'return of the state' is invoked constantly in popular media and academic research over the last few years. Does the evolution of the Canadian welfare state in its making in the postwar period and the remaking in the turn neoliberal turn of public administration and public policy support the 'return' thesis?

But I searched through the notes and didn’t see any return of the state (maybe it appeared in an article but I didn’t summarize it, this is the disadvantage of relying heavily on notes), so I had to vaguely guide the role of this state to a place I am more sure of, and then follow my own statement to find out a series of neoliberal policies from the reading to examine the key issues of the formulation and reform of the Canadian welfare state:

 The post-war period brought intense societal changes to advanced industrial democracies, and Canada is no exception. Scholars have often linked these changes to a power struggle between state and market, with the state “returning” to intervene in markets and provide greater social welfare. However, rather than imagining a scale of “strong” or “weak” states in relation to markets, it is better to view the post-war evolution of Canadian public administration and public policy from the perspective of shifts in institutional and class power within a Canadian state that has always been present.

When answering the questions, I relied on my previous training in the history department: treat all the readings as historical materials, and extract fragments from them to support my own arguments. This answering method uses about a dozen bibliographies for each question, and can read across different topics, giving people a sense of integration of the entire course. One of the professors even commented: "I especially appreciate the way the student has integrated these engagements into a cohesive and compell ing argument, which is rather uncommon for qualifying exams." It can be said that most of the answers are highly appreciated.

However, as a student of politics, there are also difficulties that I still don’t know how to overcome. For example, in the two exams, the professor said that I should “distinguish more clearly the different approaches the scholars you discuss have taken”. The reason why I couldn’t do it was probably because I didn’t take enough methods or theoretical courses in the politics department. In addition, my answering method is actually a bit out of context. When I use a certain fragment of a certain article, it is to serve my own argument, not necessarily the original intention of the author.

In any case, judging from the comments, in-depth discussions and abstracts of five articles are also acceptable. In fact, when I wrote the third question in the first year, due to time constraints, I probably abstracted six articles, and finally made a random paragraph of my own opinion. It is not surprising that the professors said that it was the one with the weakest argument.

In the past two years of doctoral class, because of these two core courses that have nothing to do with my research and the highly stressful examination system, I lost a lot of hair, ate a lot of snacks (eh?), and endured verbal bullying and harassment by Russian-Jewish classmates for several months , because English reading is slow after all.

Fortunately, these two years of suffering have finally passed.

As a master's qualification exam, I was inexplicably blocked twice. I'm not sure if Taiwan's doctoral qualification exam will be a real person? But I am sure that in Canadian doctoral classes, the qualification test is mostly just to ensure that you have read the books you should read and can discuss issues like an independent scholar (there is no grade in the qualification test, and the quality of the answer is at most to determine the content of these professors' recommendation letters in the future), rather than being a student. Although there will always be a student who is dismissed every few years, according to the statistics, most of the doctoral students who cannot go further are usually not in the doctoral qualification examination, but in the oral examination of the dissertation proposal, so there is no need to be too nervous about preparing for the doctoral qualification examination-of course, this is the conclusion only after passing.

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