Ph.D. Qualifying ExaminationFrom Stanford Electrical Engineering Department Graduate Handbook(Difference between revisions)
Revision as of 18:27, 22 January 2009Admission Requirements
Admission to the Qualifying Examination is limited to Electrical Engineering graduate students who, when admitted, were not notified that they are ineligible to take the examination. Applications are accepted in October, and admission decisions are typically made within one week. The Department allows students two attempts to pass the qualifying examination. There is no GPA requirement for students in their first academic year of graduate study at Stanford. Students in their second or later years require a GPA in technical courses of 3.5 or greater for admission to the quals. Post-MS students must take the Qualifying Examination at the first opportunity, normally winter quarter of the first year after matriculation. Applicants who do not meet the GPA requirement will be considered only if the application is accompanied by a statement giving acceptable supporting evidence of academic achievement based on the latest 45 units of course work. It is the responsibility of applicants in their statement to bring the most favorable aspects of their records to the attention of the Department. Students who have received notification of ineligibility for the qualifying examination may petition to become eligible after the the end of the winter quarter of their first year of graduate study at Stanford. Such petitions will be considered only when accompanied by a written statement of support from a regular EE faculty member. Examination FormatThe examination consists of ten separate 10-minute oral exams given individually in one day by the professors on the student's examination committee. The exams take place in faculty offices and are scheduled with at least 12 minutes between each exam. The ten professors who make up each student's examination committee are selected by a scheduling program that is designed to ensure fairness based on students' individual ranking of potential examiners. Students list their desired faculty examiners on a preference form. Each student must rank 20 professors in four groups of five. Professors are grouped according to question areas (listed below). No more than six professors from any one question may be listed. The scheduling program constructs committees, chosing more examiners from the higher ranked groups than from the lower ranked groups. Typically, all committees consist of four examiners from the first group and respectively three, two and one from each of the three remaining groups. The scheduling program also guarantees breadth of committees since no more than four examiners can be in any one question area.
More information about these question areas, including relevant courses, texts, and associated faculty, can be found in the quals Web page ee.stanford.edu/phd/quals. Questions from previous years can be purchased at the FedEx Kinko's in Tressider Union. Application DeadlinesThe Qualifying Examinations will take place the second week of Winter Quarter, January 12-16, 2009. The deadline for return of applications for the 2008-2009 Qualifying Examinations is 'Sunday, October 31', 2008. Applicants who are accepted to the qualifying examinations must submit a examiner preference form by Friday, December 19, 2008. The EE quals Web page ee.stanford.edu/phd/quals contains a link to the online application form and information about the technical areas that each of the examiners will cover. Scoring and ResultsExaminers score each session on a scale of 0 to 10. The scores are normalized to account for faculty scoring variations, and the normalized scores are summed to arrive at the candidates' final scores. The results of the Qualifying Examination are determined at a meeting of the Electrical Engineering Department faculty held the week after the examination. The lowest passing score will be determined by a vote of the faculty. The number of students passed depends on an estimate of the number of students the faculty are able to supervise in research. Students will also be notified of the examination results by letter and by email. A printout including individual scores and other information may be picked up from the Department Office during the week following the examination decisions. Students who are unsuccessful in their second attempt in the quals will ordinarily not be retained in the Ph.D. program unless they petition the Department for special consideration. This petition must be submitted by Friday, February 8, 2008. The Department Qualifying Examination Review Committee, chaired by the Vice Chair of the Department, will then either : (1) confirm the examination results, in which case the student will then no longer be considered to be in the Ph.D. program; (2) or reverse the decision; (3) or recommend that the student be allowed to take the examination again the following year, possibly subject to specific performance standards being met. More information about appeals procedures can be found in the next section of this handbook. WarningsStudents should rely on published information about faculty question areas; they should not approach potential examiners with specific questions aimed at determining details of what the examiners intend to ask. Faculty should not reply to individual inquiries about question areas. Students should not ask faculty examiners for an evaluation of performance, nor should students argue their scores with examiners, either immediately after the exam or at a later time. Except for clerical errors, no scores may be changed once the examiners have submitted them to the Department. Summary CalendarHere are the important dates for the 2008-2009 Qualifying Examinations.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||