Comprehensive Exams

Comprehensives exams aka COMPS are meant to test a doctoral student's command of a certain field of knowledge. Each discipline, and department has a different way of doing things. In our social anthropology department what this means is that we, the students, need to (a) decide what two areas you'd like to specialize in - out department has four general areas: i power, politics and development ii knowledge systems, iii representation, identity and performance and iv health, illness and the body (I'm interested in the first two); (b) organize a comp committee consisting of your supervisor and two other anthropologists who have knowledge of the field, are interested in the project and available to work with you; (c) determine a general question that you would like to tackle in one of the four areas (and then keep revising it); (c) create (and revise, revise, revise) an annotated bibliography that you will use to answer the question; (d) once everyone is satisfied with the question and the bibliography, then we have roughly three months to read the material and write up a response to the question and (e) then your committee judges if you've done a good job or not.

In our department, this is rarely a quick and speedy process, especially, if you're like me, learning whole new bodies of literature because you've decided to change your topic from your master's project or after your field experience. The outcomes of this process are, a comprehensive understanding of a sub-topic and a bibliography that can be the basis of a class that you can teach.

Bougainvillea