Doctoral programs usually do not have many exams. None of my classes, as far as I know, will have an exam of any kind. Two major writing projects, which will take about 2 years total, have no exam component apart from an oral defense of the dissertation. All the exams for the PhD program are concentrated in a space of 15 days, and for those you only have to know…everything. I’m looking forward to the study for those exams but not the ordeal itself.<\/p>\n
There are two exceptions to the above in my program. I must pass reading proficiency tests in French and German. This summer I have to pass one, and next summer the other. The school offers non-credit (but for-pay) courses for each in alternating summers. I opted to learn French on my own and tomorrow is the exam. If I fail, I can take the test again on July 31. If I fail again, I have a whole semester to do whatever I want. (Assuming they let me take the test a third time and thus continue classes in the spring.) I really want to pass it the first time so that I can get on with my life.<\/p>\n
All I have to be able to do is to read. There is no need to be able to speak, understand, or write the language. The intent is that I will be able to access books and articles in French that could be useful for my research. You can use a dictionary, but it is a timed test. I feel pretty good about it, not knowing how long the test will be or how precise the grading will be. You have to score an 86 to pass. Overall I am surprised at how easily it came and how similar French is to English. It may help that I used to know Spanish and have studied other foreign languages. There is a sense of accomplishment when a page that looked like gobbledy-gook only a few months ago now makes sense (with a dictionary at hand). It’s also cool that now I can understand much of what this amazing website<\/a> says. Listening to it, of course, is another story; it all sounds like a bunch of vowels strung together.<\/p>\n Update: The test was hard. My take is that they intend for students to fail, at least the first time. I won’t know if I passed for a week or two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Doctoral programs usually do not have many exams. None of my classes, as far as I know, will have an exam of any kind. Two major writing projects, which will take about 2 years total, have no exam component apart from an oral defense of the dissertation. All the exams for the PhD program are\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-phd-coursework"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}