Dear Candidate:

As always, full on-line information about the PhD quals is available at http://www.cs.stevens.edu/PhDQualifiers/.

The PhD Qualifying Examination in Computer Science will be administered on Monday, November 23, and Tuesday, November 24, 2009. The deadline for registering is Friday, November 13, 2009. One 90-minute examination will be administered on the 23rd: the Algorithms exam, from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. Two 90-minute examinations will be administered on the 24th: the Operating Systems exam, from 11:00am to 12:30pm; and the Programming Languages exam, from 2:00pm to 3:30pm.
The location for all three exams will be Lieb 319.

Each student must pass the qualifying exam early in his/her career. The exam has two purposes: 1) to certify that the student is broadly educated in key areas of computer science; and 2) to demonstrate that the student has become acquainted with the process of performing original research.

Accordingly, the qualifying exam has two parts: written and oral. The written portion of the qualifying exam tests the student's knowledge of fundamental computer science at an elementary level, akin to that achieved in a Bachelor's program. The written exam tests three subject areas: algorithms, programming languages, and operating systems. A student must pass all three subjects in order to pass the written exam. The exam is offered near the end of Fall and Spring semesters, timed so that grades are available at the Ph.D. progress review meeting.

A student may take the written exam at most twice. Any subjects passed the first time need not be taken the second time. The written exam should be taken during the student's first 2 semesters in the program. The written exam must be completely passed during the student's first 4 semesters in the program.

The purpose of the oral portion of the qualifying exam is for the student to demonstrate promise in doing independent original research. The student will perform some work as specified by and under the supervision of his/her advisor. Ideally, this work would consist of the actual production of publishable research results; however, depending on circumstances, it may be more appropriate for the student to perform some type of pre-research work. The student will write a report detailing his/her effort and accomplishments. The student will give a public, announced talk detailing his/her effort and accomplishments. The paper will be read, and the talk attended, by the student's advisor and two other pre-selected regular Stevens faculty members. These three faculty will decide whether the student has passed the oral exam. In style, the report and the talk must be similar to research presentations given by experienced researchers. If either the report or the talk is judged to be inadequate in either content or presentation, this fact will be taken into account during the faculty's evaluation of the student that semester. The student may be terminated, placed on probation, required to prepare a new report or talk, perform further research, or subjected to other remedial scholarly action(s).

The oral qualifying exam must be passed no more than 12 months after passage of the written qualifying exam, or by the end of student's 5th semester in the program, whichever is earlier.

Any student wishing to take the Qualifying Exams this April must notify the Computer Science Department office by Friday, November 13, 2009. Notification must be accompanied by the identification of a faculty member who will oversee the student's project for the oral PhD Qualifying Examination, as per the instructions on the announcement page.

The web page contains lists of the topics covered on the three required exams, as well as titles of appropriate books from which to study. Students should note that a PhD qualifying exam is an exam on a topic within computer science, not an exam on a particular course or sequence of courses offered at Stevens. Questions may therefore be of types not covered in any course, nor seen on course exams. In particular, a qualifying exam question on one subject may test a student's understanding of the connection between that subject and another (required) subject. For example, an operating systems question might test the student's understanding of efficient algorithm design, by asking the student to design and/or reason about the complexity of an algorithm to solve a given OS problem.

Communication regarding the qualifying examination may be directed to Professor Nicolosi at (Prof Nicolosi's last name) AT cs.stevens.edu.