Preliminary Exam

Timeline for Taking the Preliminary Examination

All students must complete a preliminary examination at the end of their second year which consists of a "second year paper” and an “oral defense” (more detail below). The second year paper must be submitted to the student’s preliminary exam committee and the DGS by May 1st and the oral examination must be completed by May 15th.

Students should speak with both their first field chair and their primary advisor(s) well in advance of these deadlines to ensure a shared understanding of what is expected.

Second Year Paper

In quantitative fields, the second year paper will generally be a “results-blind” paper which includes a draft preregistration of all data collection and analysis (students should not formally preregister until their advisor(s) give the go-ahead). That is, all aspects of the paper should be complete except for the mechanical collection of data and the writing of the code for analyzing that data, as outlined in the preregistration (this requirement does not restrict exploratory data analysis used to generate hypotheses, but field norms of separation between data used to generate and test hypotheses should generally be observed).

Formal Theory second year papers should follow this same "results-blind" approach, except that the piece that may be incomplete is the analysis of the model or the solving of the game.

Political Theory second year papers should be a précis for a publishable article and will generally include both a summary of the motivating question and its importance within a literature, along with a concrete plan for addressing that question.

Oral Defense

The oral portion of the exam will be an approximately one-hour defense in which exam committee members may ask questions related to the student’s second year paper, including all literature that faculty consider relevant to the broad research topic. That is, the oral portion is not intended to be a “comprehensive” examination of the student’s primary field, but only of the literatures that are relevant to their particular area of interest within that field (fields may, at their discretion, require comprehensive/qualifying exams in addition to the preliminary exam).

Exam Committees

A preliminary exam committee consists of one primary advisor for the student (exactly one – students with co-advising will only have one advisor on the committee, and this person chairs the committee), three other people from the student’s primary field, and one person from their secondary field. The DGS will construct each student’s committee in consultation with the relevant field chairs. Each committee chair will submit a brief committee report to the DGS by May 15th which explains the exam outcome and, whatever the outcome, gives the committee’s frank assessment of the student’s performance in the exam based on both the paper and the oral defense (in cases of within-committee disagreement, this should be noted and explained). If the committee fails the student’s exam, they may offer the student the option to retake the exam according to the requirements outlined by The Graduate School.