The Bad Old Days

In an earlier post on undergraduate admissions, a few commenters raised the issue of workloads. Undergrads don’t work as hard, don’t put in as many homework hours, and still get decent grades, they said, which only makes it impossible for the rigorous teachers to hold the line on sliding standards.

The remarks brought me back to graduate school, recalling the old “when I was in school refrain.” So, here’s the way it was at UCLA in the 1980s for an English Ph.D. The school was on the quarter system, with three terms of 10 weeks plus one finals week each year. It seemed that a quarter tried to pack a semester’s worth of work into 11 weeks, and undergraduates did, indeed, meet for four hours per week, not three (as in the semester system).

Requirements for the doctorate included:

1, Course work in eight different areas.
2. One class of bibliography.
3. Two classes of philology (I remember doing phonetic transcriptions of Pope).
4. Three classes in pedagogy.
5. Written qualifying exams at the beginning of the third year.
6. An oral exam in the fifth or sixth year (generally on the dissertation topic).

No. 4 is worth more description. The qualifying exams were called the Part Ones, and everyone lived in fear of them. Each candidate had to take four exams of four hours each taken over a two-week period. Each exam was in a specific historical period, plus a few special areas such as Critical Theory (you could only pick one of these as part of the four). Each exam had three parts. The first part involved a thematic question about the field as a whole, and might single out certain texts for commentary (and it required lots of illustration). The second part provided a passage or short text from the period and asked for an analysis of it. The third part asked a specific question about one of three texts that had been assigned in advance.

Each field had a reading list of several pages. Anything on the lists was fair game for the first question. For an idea of how broad they could be, the Theory list began with Plato and Aristotle and moved through Longinus, Augustine, Dante, Sidney, Enlightenment rhetoricians, German Romantics, Marx and Engels and Trotsky, Arnold and Hulme and Eliot, the New Critics, some New York Intellectuals and structuralists, before getting to poststructuralism.

The attrition rate, I was once told, was around 40 percent. It was a public university, and anybody could be flunked out without much loss to the program. If you failed, you had one more chance, and then goodbye.

Do requirements of that magnitude still exist anywhere?