A University of Manitoba professor is alleging a doctoral candidate twice failed his comprehensive examination, then appealed to be reinstated on the basis that he suffers from the disability of extreme examination anxiety.
The professor — who asked not to be named — said he has filed a complaint to the U of M senate alleging a senior administrator reinstated the student into the doctoral program and ruled that the student’s PhD be determined solely on the basis of his doctoral thesis…
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Notes of a Neophyte
January 22nd, 2010 at 12:01PM
I have a problem with the fact that the student gets to completely avoid the exam stage. It is not a problem that he does not test well — as testing is not necessarily a good indicator of ability to do research — but that he gets to avoid that step all together.
January 22nd, 2010 at 1:20PM
Fine — the department should let the senior administrator direct the thesis and then it should put a letter in the student’s file certifying that the degree does not come from that department but from the Department of Micro-Management.
January 22nd, 2010 at 1:23PM
I only wonder how someone with disabling examination anxiety got as far as taking comprehensive exams in a PhD program– I’d have thought that being really good at taking exams is one of the basic requirements for getting to that point. My (admittedly distant) recollection is that I’d taken quite a large number of exams up to that point in my own academic career.
January 22nd, 2010 at 1:53PM
I wondered the same thing, Matt. Unless this was a recent disability, it’s hard to see how the student got as far as a PhD exam.
January 22nd, 2010 at 3:29PM
(off-topic) UD, do you prefer to get story tips by email, or do you prefer comments marked as off-topic?
January 22nd, 2010 at 3:30PM
Omri: Email.
January 22nd, 2010 at 4:22PM
We had a grad director in our program who was a sucker for this. Grad students would come to her feeling sickly and hysterical the morning of the prelim, and she would give them another 6 months even though their funding depended on their making good progress through the program. One student the other students supsected of drinking coffee, eating Twinkies and smoking cigarettes all night while studying would show up looking especially sickly on test day.
THere are programs that have different kinds of prelim requirements or no requirements and I always thought those test anxiety students should have looked for a more appropriate program.
January 22nd, 2010 at 5:50PM
Since I have a terrible case of freshman essay grading anxiety, I am asking Gilligan to hire a grader or two to help with my disability.
January 22nd, 2010 at 6:03PM
tp: If only Annemarie Surprenant had thought of that.
January 23rd, 2010 at 9:35AM
Hmm…
Again, this is discipline specific – and maybe mentor, too.
It is quite common for faculty, including me, to have students make research presentations and make the questioning and so forth sort of tough in order to get students prepared for prelims. Students themselves often run mock prelim sessions.
Even so, you occasionally run into curmudgeons on exams who like to pull the wings off defenseless flies. Part of being a good prelim exam committee member is trying to find out what students know, rather than what they don’t.