Comprehensive Examination

All M.S. students must pass an oral comprehensive exam centering on a defense of the student's written thesis proposal.

The Ph.D. Comprehensive Examination tests for breadth of knowledge across the core areas of computer science. A core area illuminates the ways that most applications are designed and implemented, examines the hardware and software systems that are needed to execute the applications, and analyzes the resulting performance of such applications. To demonstrate their knowledge of these topics, Ph.D. students are required to successfully complete a set of designated courses plus pass a comprehensive exam in each core area.

While core areas will correlate closely with courses offered by this department, the material deemed essential to each topic shall be defined by a reading list, not the coverage of any given class.

The comprehensive exams will be given once a year in the Fall. All parts of the comprehensive examination must be passed prior to completion of the fifth semester of study, not including summer enrollment. Subject to this time limit, failed exams may be repeated without the need to re-take those parts previously passed.

The comprehensive exam will be prepared and graded by a faculty committee. This committee will be appointed in the spring semester prior to the offering date of the exam for which they are responsible. The committee will complete all work involved in writing examination questions and updating the reading list by the end of the spring semester prior to the offering date of the exam for which they are responsible. The same committee will be responsible for grading completed exams the following fall.

The comprehensive exam will be administered as a closed book exam.

The comprehensive exam committee is responsible for insuring that the core area exams satisfy the following criteria:

All questions should be answerable by a well prepared CS Ph.D. candidate who is not specializing in the topic area covered by the question.
All questions should be answerable based on the reading list and background that can reasonably be assumed to be a prerequisite to understanding what is included in the reading list.
Adequate time is available for completing all of the questions on the exam.

The comprehensive exam committee is responsible for determining a single score for the entire exam. It is important that this be based on an analysis of the overall quality of answers we expect from our Ph.D. candidates, not just on a numerical average of individual question grades. In particular, the exam committee should insure that passing exams demonstrate adequate knowledge across all major areas covered by the exam:

Hardware: VLSI, networking, architecture
Systems and languages: Operating systems, compilers
Foundations: Algorithms, basic theory, language semantics

Further details about the comprehensive exams and the current reading lists can be found on the graduate studies web page at http://www.cs.utah.edu/grad-studies.

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