TO:  Faculty and Students in the CS Department
FROM: The Comprehensive Committee
SUBJECT:  Preparation for the Comprehensive Exam


While not a "policy decision", we feel the need to issue a bulletin to PhD
students in the department who have not yet passed the Comprehensive exam.
Our interviews with students who have  failed the exam reveal an  alarming
lack of studying,  which perhaps  explains in part  the increasingly  poor
pass rate. A PhD student in this department is expected to spend 20  hours
per week  working on  their RA  or  TAship.  Until  they have  passed  the
Comprehensive, we  expect them  to spend  significant amounts  of time  in
addition, preparing for the exam.  Such  preparation can take the form  of
self-study from  the  reading list,  or  taking courses  and  working  the
problems in those courses.

While it  is difficult  to define  a level  of effort  that is  likely  to
produce success  on the  comprehensive  exam, the  following  observations
should provide  some guidelines.   Each of  the six  areas encompasses  an
amount of material  roughly equal  to two  quarter courses.   If a  person
needs all  twelve  such courses,  i.e.,  that person  had  essentially  no
Computer  Science  preparation   beyond  elementary   programming  as   an
undergraduate, then  we estimate  12*(100hrs/course)=1200 hours  of  study
would be necessary.  The results of this calculation differ little in  the
case of self-guided study, rather than courses, since of the estimated 100
hours, only 30 or fewer are actually spent in class.  If a student has had
most or all of the material  covered by a course, then considerably  fewer
than 100 hours  might suffice, but  it is unlikely  that zero  preparation
will do.

A little additional  calculation will  indicate that  someone with  little
preparation for the exam  will spend most  of his or  her first year  here
preparing for the comprehensive.  While the total amount of time per  week
spent in academic pursuits varies from  person to person, we feel that  it
is normal for people in intellectually challenging careers to put in  more
than the  canonical  40  hours/week.  There  are  approximately  30  weeks
between the time a  student enters the program  and the Spring comps.   If
that student has a 20  hour/week TA or RA-ship,  and, because of a  medium
level  of  prior  preparation,  can  do  with,  say,  900  hours  of  comp
preparation, then 50 hours/week must be  devoted to study and research  or
teaching responsibilities.  Notice that a person in this category, who has
only a few comprehensive-related courses prior to coming to Stanford, will
have little time in the first year to take courses that are not related to
the comprehensive.

As a corollary of this estimation, in  order to take courses that are  not
directly related to the comp in the first year, such as CS204, or the VLSI
course, the  student  must have  a  fairly  good background  in  CS.   The
alternative, which we do not disapprove of,  is to expect not to pass  the
exam until Winter of the student's second year.