by Vera Oko
Anyone who has pursued or started a PhD is familiar with the rite of passage and the academic milestone known as the Comprehensive Examination. But, what is a comprehensive exam? What makes it so daunting? How can one navigate this critical phase and find success? If you’re asking these questions, you’ve come to the right place.
What is a comprehensive examination?
The comprehensive exam, also known as “comps,” or the “qualifying exam,” is a major milestone in most PhD programs that assesses your mastery of key theories, methodologies, debates, writing, synthesis, communication, and literature in your field to determine if you are ready to proceed to the dissertation stage.
I came to know more about the exam when it was time for me to write it. I began by taking the time to research what a comprehensive exam entails by searching the internet for tips on how to approach them. My search quickly made clear that these exams are widely regarded as challenging. Multiple sources pointed to their intensity, the pressure of having limited attempts, and the high stakes involved. For instance, on platforms such as Quora and Academia, users frequently described the exam as the most challenging and difficult stage in a doctoral program (Academia Stack Exchange 2025; Quora 2024). Some programs reportedly have pass rates as low as 50% and allow only one or two chances before dismissal from the program (Quora 2024). Survivors of this ultimate test, across the internet, consistently described the experience as stressful and mentally demanding, regardless of discipline, school, or format.
Regardless of the fact that the particulars of any exam is going to differ depending on the school, department, or even individual student, there are some significant commonalities that seem consistent across contexts. For example, most comprehensive exams in the social sciences in Canada and the United States are graded by a committee of professors who want to see that the student has sufficient breadth and depth in the area of study and that they can answer the question(s) based on evidence from the literature. Whether the exam is written in person without books or notes or is a take-home exam for a week or many months, will depend on the institution.
I cannot speak for all other departments, but I wrote my comprehensive exam in 2025 as a doctoral student at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. Each department in the Faculty of Social Science, has a slightly different way of doing things. At the Institute, students are expected to develop two sets of two questions (one general, one specific) along with a reading list for each one comprised of about 25 books and/or articles, to be submitted by the end of the summer after their first year of coursework. The student’s committee reviews the questions in September and secretly decides on which of the two the student will eventually be writing. The student then prepares by reading the material and preparing to write either question until they decide that they are ready to be given the committee’s selected questions. Once the trigger is pulled, the student has six weeks to answer each question in the form of two 25-30 page papers.
However, for the sociology program at the University of Ottawa, the committee of professors develops one general and one specific question with a reading list for each and the student is given six months to write two 50-page responses to the questions and then pass an oral defense of their answers. The anthropology doctoral students are required to develop a course plan on a topic relevant to their research and write an accompanying 20 page paper explaining their choices, also followed by an oral defense in front of their committee.
My supervisor, Phyllis, tells me that when she was a graduate student in sociology at the University of Iowa, she had to write two closed-book, closed-note sit down exams that were each 8 hours long and 4 sets of questions (each with a choice of two responses). At least one question would be on methods and one on theory. And the questions were general to the field, rather than to the specific research of individual students, so committees were set based on faculty expertise. So sometimes multiple students wrote the same exam.
In most cases, exams are marked satisfactory/not-satisfactory or some other version of pass fail. At the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, if any two members of the four-professor committee fail the student on any question, the student fails the exam. If one professor fails the student on both questions, as long as the other professors don’t fail either question, the student will still pass. If a student fails, they get a second chance, unless they had failed a previous course, in which case, two fails means the end of their program.
I’m proud to say that I passed on my first try! Drawing from my experience as a PhD student and as a mother of a then five-year-old, I offer some practical tips below to help you succeed, too!
Ten Pieces of Advice for Surviving your Comps
Advice #1 – Listen to Your Supervisor
Listen to your supervisor. I cannot stress this enough. Your supervisor is your advisor for a reason. A PhD supervisor is in charge of guiding you through your academic journey. My supervisor Professor Phyllis Rippey, (you might know her from the website doingsocialresearch.com) greatly helped in guiding my work and approach to research. Through regular monthly meetings with all of her graduate students and one-on-one sessions when needed, she was able to give me advice specifically tailored to my work and help me even strategize how to prepare for the exam and even sometimes life beyond the research lab.
She is a sociologist with expertise on the politics of breastfeeding (the subject of my own research) and also recently served as the director of the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies in 2023-2024. Having published the book Breastfeeding and the Pursuit of Happiness (2021), amongst numerous other publications on breastfeeding, Professor Rippey’s years of practice, expertise and knowledge is a gift that I do not take for granted. Shortly before I started the comprehensive exam, she emphasized several key points and advice that I took seriously. I lay out her most helpful advice below.
Advice #2 – Answer the Question
This is by far one of the most valuable pieces of advice I have ever received in life, as this idea has helped me far beyond the comprehensive examination. Though it seems obvious in some ways, when you’re reading vast amounts of material, you’re impulse can be to want to prove everything you now know. As she emphasized, “the question in a comprehensive exam is not simply whether or not you know something on a topic; the question is how you tailor your knowledge to answer the exam question.”
Not only did this advice help me keep my writing on track to answer my comprehensive exam questions, this has also helped nudge me to stay on topic in other areas including structuring conference presentations, grading undergraduate student work as a teaching assistant, or even in discussions with friends and family.
Advice #3 – Prioritize Cohesion and Coherence
In other words, ensure that your arguments flow logically and smoothly, with clear connections between ideas and has a well-organized structure. Taking this advice means that you take care to communicate your ideas clearly and avoid unnecessary jargon.
Advice #4 Don’t Assume You Have Nothing New to Learn About Writing
Despite already having a bachelor’s and master’s degree under my belt, there’s a difference between writing for an undergrad paper and writing as a scholar. I regularly consulted the writing section of the Doing Social Research website for guidance. The post a A Formula for the Introduction was especially helpful.
I also used the online tools I wrote about here to help me organize my ideas and help with clarity. As a final step before submitting my answers, I ran my finished work through Grammarly, to check my writing for spelling errors, grammar mistakes, punctuation, clarity, conciseness, and so on.
Advice #5 Write every day & keep moving forward
Because there is a clear deadline for a comprehensive exam, which failing to meet means failing out of a program, good time management is essential. This was no easy feat as a mother of a five-year-old and a full time PhD student working as a teaching and a research assistant while helping as a co-organizer of a feminist graduate research conference. My motto for getting through became: “keep moving forward.” This didn’t mean push till I drop or burn out. Rather, I aimed to achieve what I could, when I could, according to my daily capacity. Although part of me seeks perfection from myself, I soon realized just how unattainable this is in academic writing. Consistency was a much better pathway to success than getting blocked in frustration for not producing perfect answers as soon as I sat at the keyboard. So, every day, even when I did not feel like it, I wrote as much as I could. When I didn’t know what else to say, I would use writing prompts like the ones I shared here on DSR: Writing Prompts to Overcome Writer’s Block.
Advice #6 Take care of those you love, starting with yourself
Part of what helped me to keep moving forward was listening I listened to the cues from my body, my brain, and my daughter, while reassuring myself that I was doing my best. When I needed a break, I took one. When I was tired, I rested. When I was hungry, I ate. When I needed to listen to music and dance, I got my groove on.
As a single mom and international student, there were times when I had to plunk my daughter in front of a screen so I could squeeze in a bit more time to keep writing, attend to conference organizing, grade papers or attend to any number of competing demands. Though generally understanding, she would occasionally pout when I couldn’t play with her, adding an additional layer of mom guilt to my plate. Theoretically, as a doctoral student specializing in breastfeeding and motherhood studies, I understood how the patriarchal systems within which we live, overburden mothers operating in a space where love, guilt, exhaustion, resistance and contradictions often co-exist (Rippey 2021). However, knowing this intellectually, did not remove the feelings that came with having to say no sometimes to my daughter’s invitations to play with her.
During the hard times, I reminded myself that saying “no” when necessary and carving out time for my work was essential for both my and my daughter’s long-term health and well-being. Knowing that I was moving forward to achieving my goals also helped in the short term by alleviating mental stress which let me be more at ease when I had time to really engage with her.
Additionally, in the spirit of self-love and self-care, know that negative self-talk will only add to the stress. Speak kindly to yourself, as you would to a dear friend. Through this, I acknowledged my progress and stayed on course.
Advice #7 Do what you can, when you can
Though I would often try to schedule study sessions, perfectly time breaks, and moments for personal time, I often ended up unable to follow this schedule. I had heard that multitasking was an art that came naturally to women, but this was not the case for me not to me. However, the six weeks of exam writing, became a crash course in learning how to multitask. One trick that helped me was that, while I stretched and exercised, I would scroll through social media or listen to doing social research podcasts while taking notes. Sometimes I would do similar activities while doing chores to maximize productivity. The comps turned me into a multitasker. Thanks Comps!
Advice #8 – Edit, Edit, Edit
Never submit a piece of academic writing without thoroughly revising it for grammatical errors, clarity, and structure. Professor Phyllis Rippey emphasized that while editing might seem minor or an afterthought to most students, it is quite critical for achieving flow, readability, and being taken seriously as an academic writer. “Aim to finish early,” she advised. “Then give it to a friend and come back to it in 3–5 days to revise and edit it.” She also recommended printing it out and reading the work out loud, noting that both strategies can help uncover blunders I might otherwise miss.
This advice was echoed again in the Doing Social Research podcast, particularly in the episodes Researching Extractivism in Mining and in Scholarship with Dr. Willow Scobie and Researching Writing & Portmanteau Words with Dr. Maggie Werner, where both guests touched on the importance of editing in academic writing.
When the time came, took this advice, managing to finish one week ahead of the deadline. I then stepped away from the 60-page paper for 3 days after handing it to trusted friends for review and feedback. I urged them to be savage and brutal in their criticisms. For this part of the process, the incredible Farinaz Basmechi, a two-time PhD student, reviewed my work, and her feedback was worth more than five editors combined. I also deeply appreciated the insight of Dr. Chidia Maduekwe, who generously lent his time to review my work. As a medical doctor, he brought an educated lens but one less familiar with concepts in my particular field. Both his and Farinaz’s feedback helped bring me back to streamline my answers, especially in returning to my supervisor’s first advice: “Answer the question and don’t get derailed by related but digressive details.” (During the time I waited to hear back from my beloved editors, I prepared and delivered a guest lecture. I was very proud of my use of time here.)
After receiving feedback from my army of two editors, I returned to the draft with fresh eyes. I revised again, incorporating the feedback I had received. Then I printed the work and read it in hard copy. It truly helped surface errors I previously missed in editing on my laptop, as Professor Rippey had said.
Advice #9 Create a Submission Checklist
Before submitting my comprehensive exam, I made sure to check off the following:
- Did I answer the question?
- Did I have an argument/thesis statement?
- Did I stay on track without going off on tangents?
- Did I synthesize and critically analyze the material without just describing?
- Did I include an introduction and conclusion that provided an overview of what came in between them?
- Did I follow formatting guidelines (e.g. font, font size, margin sizes, page numbers? Are the page numbers in the same font as the rest of the exam?)
- Did I proofread and edit, edit, edit?
I had aimed to submit one day early, but for some reason, I was still dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s at 7 a.m. on the day of the deadline while simultaneously preparing my five-year-old daughter for school. Looking back, I feel like I wouldn’t believe someone could have gotten all that done, if I hadn’t lived it myself.
Advice #10 Celebrate the wins while keeping everything in its right perspective
Fast forward, two months later, I received the result: a resounding S for Satisfactory from all four committee members with heaps of congratulatory messages for getting through one of the hardest stages of a PhD.
The comprehensive examination represents a significant academic and personal milestone, demanding rigorous preparation, strategic time management, and emotional resilience. While the process varies across institutions, the demand for critical engagement, scholarly synthesis, and clear communication remain constant. In my experience, much like gold refined by fire, writing my comprehensive exam worked to sharpen my focus, deepen my self-awareness, and called me to listen more attentively to my advisor, to myself, and to my ever evolving needs. Ultimately, I found that the true destination was not in merely passing the exam, but in the growth and learning gained throughout the process.
My exam was not perfect, but the process taught the perfectionist in me that I am allowed to be an imperfect human, just as none of the research and writing I examined was ever entirely complete or without flaws.
Though the graduate and writing journey can sometimes feel isolating, I hope you remember the many ways in which you are not alone and that you seek and accept support from advisors, peers, friends, and mentors. And should you find this writing when it all feels overwhelming, know that your exam is just one step in the vast, complex, and beautiful journey that is your life.