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The Comprehensive Exam
The comprehensive exam (Comps) is taken by all students in the Astronomy Graduate Program during their second year.
``No student is without his or her "gaps" in astronomy background and preparation, so the exam will not be derailed if we come across a topic or two with which you are not particularly familiar. What we will be seeking however, is a demonstration that you have a substantial grounding in most areas of astronomy, and that you are capable of applying what you know to make sense of a given problem and to approach a solution.''
The Purpose of the Exam back to topThe purpose of the comprehensive exam is twofold:
- to assess the students general knowledge of astronomy and physics at the graduate level
- to assess their capacity to perform fundamental research, and thus to become successful research scientists
The assessment is based partially on work done by each student during the required, two-quarter, second-year research project (Astronomy 277 A & B). First-year students are encouraged to identify a faculty advisor who is willing to oversee the project before the summer of their first year, and to begin the project as early as possible. The assessment will be based on what can reasonably be expected from a 2-quarter effort, but in practice, this is a minimum, and it is in a student's best interest to maximize the outcome of this research experience by committing as much time as is feasible and warranted.
Requirements back to topA student must satisfy several requirements in order to be assessed for the comprehensive exam:
- take all nine core course in Astronomy offered during the first 5 quarters and achieve a grade average of at least B.
Exceptions or substitutions can be made by petition only, in advance, to the graduate advisor.- Satisfactorily complete the two-quarter second year research project
culminating in a written report which is given to the faculty advisor and later to the members of the examination committee. The deadline for giving the report to the faculty advisor is constrained by the need to assign a grade for the course, Astronomy 277. The due date is thereby set by arrangement between student and advisor, with the understanding that the advisor must assign the grade, and provide critical feedback to the student no later than the Monday following finals week. The faculty member responsible for Astronomy 277 (usually either the Vice-Chair or the Graduate Advisor) will assign the grade on a project after consultation with the advisor on that project. The student will have the opportunity to use the feedback from the faculty advisor to produce a final, rewritten version of the report before submitting it to the Comprehensive Examination Committee.
Assessment back to topAssessment will be based on:
- The written report from the second year exam.
- performance in an oral comprehensive examination.
- Instructors assessments from the core classes taken so far.
Who will be on the Comprehensive Examination Committee?
The members of the exam committee (CEC) will be UCLA faculty members affiliated with the Division of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Subject to the possible exception listed below, the Graduate Advisor will be a member of the CEC, and he or she will enlist two other faculty members for the committee, for a total of three, by the end of the first full week of the Winter Quarter. At that time, the graduate advisor will distribute the CEC committee membership to the second-year students. If a student's 2nd-year project advisor is on the CEC, that student has until the beginning of February to exercise the option of requesting that his or her advisor (this could include the graduate advisor) be excluded from the CEC. If that option is exercised, the graduate advisor will replace that CEC member with another, ensuring that if the replacement faculty member is also advising a student for a second-year project, then his or her advisee does not have an objection.
What kind of written report is required, and when should it be delivered to the Exam Committee?
The written report from the second year project will be submitted to the Comprehensive Exam Committee no later than a week before the exam. The format and style of the written document should ideally follow that of a research paper which might be submitted to a scientific journal: concise, well-reasoned, grammatically correct, and containing sections such as an introduction, a section on methodology, a discussion and a final section on conclusions and perspectives. It is reasonable for the introduction section to be more thorough than might normally be the case for a scientific publication. The precise format is, however, left to negotiation between the student and the faculty advisor for the project, as some topics may require a flexible format. Students should keep in mind that poor English and poor style of presentation will be judged unfavorably, but that a perfectly formatted, glitzy paper containing an abundance of striking images does not compensate for a lack of substance in the writing or the research. Only those images or plots relevant to the presentation of the scientific case are warranted.
When will the oral exam take place?
The Oral Comprehensive Exam will be administered sometime during the first three weeks of the Spring Quarter, the precise date to be decided upon and announced by the graduate advisor before the end of February. The precise date, or dates, will depend on faculty availability. More than one day will be scheduled if there are more than 4 or 5 students to be examined, and if so, every effort will be made to schedule those days contiguously.
What will happen in the Oral?
The following detailed guidelines are suggested for the enactment of the comprehensive exam, specifically so that an efficient and uniform procedure can be applied to all candidates from year to year.
In advance of the oral, every member of the exam committee will have read the student's written report on his or her 2nd-year project, and will have prepared questions about the report, the procedures used, the results obtained, and/or the subject investigated. Students should keep in mind that any technique that was used, any instrument, any procedure for reducing or interpreting data, or for modeling a phenomenon, should be well understood, and can be the basis for questioning. For example, students who are using or interpreting data that they may not have taken themselves should nonetheless have a clear understanding of how those data were taken, what the underlying physics of the instrument is, what the strengths or limitations of the technique might be, and how to describe the statistical significance of the results. A student talking about a polarization measurement should know what processes in nature might give rise to polarized radiation, and why. A student discussing the wavelength-dependence of dust emissivity should know, physically, what such a wavelength dependence might be attributed to. A student using a Richardson-Lucy deconvolution routine should be able to explain how that algorithm works mathematically.
The actual exam consists of a 10 minute presentation by the student of the results of the research, as if they were giving the paper at a meeting of a professional astronomical society. Therefore, the presentation should be concise, yet informative and as complete as possible, and the essential results of the research should be clearly given. The examining committee will wait until the talk is finished to ask questions. When the 10 minute presentation is complete, the committee members will pose questions about the research described, including both questions prepared in advance and questions raised by the presentation.
After approximately half an hour of questions, answers and discussion of the research project (for a total of about 40 minutes), the questioning is open to all areas of astronomy and physics in which the student will have taken courses. Also, general background knowledge in astronomy at the level of an introductory astronomy textbook is expected, whether or not the student has ever taken a general astronomy course or been a TA in one. Ideally, the questions should be chosen in advance to be those which are answerable by a nervous, yet capable student thinking on his or her feet at a blackboard. Long derivations including complex formulae are clearly to be avoided, but searching questions which probe the depth of a student's physical understanding of some phenomenon are appropiate. Some fraction of the general questions may be repeated for most or all students, so it is in the students' interest to refrain from discussing the oral exam until all of them have taken it.
The examination could end at any point between 60 and 80 minutes from the time it begins, but should not exceed 80 minutes. When the examination ends, the student is excused, and the committee immediately convenes to assess his or her performance on both the written and oral portion of the comprehensive exam. Preliminary decisions are made at this point, but final decisions on the outcome of the exam will be delayed until all students have taken the exam, and the committee has gained a global perspective on student performance.
Possible Outcomes back to top
- Pass
with immediate eligibility to proceed to the qualifying examination- No Pass
with the possibility of reassessment- Terminal Masters pass
which allows the student to finish any outstanding course requirements for the Masters degree- Fail
resulting in immediate termination of the students affiliation with the department.In the case of 'No Pass', the Committee will provide a specific list of written requirements for the student, and the examination will be re-scheduled for sometime before the end of the Summer, with the set of potential outcomes then restricted to Pass or Terminal Masters Pass. (The No Pass option can only be used once for any given student.)
The committee will notify all students within a week of the exam at the latest of whether or not they have passed.
An appeal of the Terminal Masters or Fail outcomes can be made in writing to the Department Vice-Chair for Astronomy and Astrophysics. The appeal must include a statement of the reasons why the student believes that the decision was based on erroneous or incomplete information, or was not reached in an appropriate fashion. The Vice-Chair will then convene an independent committee consisting of her or himself and two other faculty members from the Division of Astronomy and Astrophysics to hear and adjudicate the appeal by consulting with the members of the Comprehensive Exam Committee and with the student making the appeal. (If the Vice-Chair was a member of the exam committee, he or she will recuse him or herself, and find a third uninvolved replacement faculty member to chair the ad hoc appeals committee.) The decision of the ad hoc appeals committee will be based on the demonstrated presence or absence of a credible claim by the student, and not upon a reassessment of Divisional standards for adequate performance. The choices available to the ad hoc appeals committee are either to uphold the original decision or to conduct another oral examination, without prejudice to the student. This committee's decision shall be final and binding.
Past Exams back to top!!! Internal Only !!! A collection of past graduate comprehensive exam papers and talks can be found (thanks to Matthew Barczys) here.
More Information back to top
- Physics Web Page about the "Program of Graduate Studies"
- 2003-2004 Program Requirements from the Graduate Division Web Site
UCLA Astronomy - UCLA Physics - UCLA Main Page
Feedback & information: webmaster[at]astro.ucla.edu