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[punchnpie]

So, I've agreed to write 2 questions for a doctoral student's qualifying exam. My own exam was very different, being a 2 week take home with the expectation of a very long paper coming from it. This one is timed and in a classroom environment. I don't give timed exams myself, so I don't have much experience with this.

Is there a good way to figure how long it should take to answer a question? I think I'm having two issues here 1) even though this was an area on my qualifying exam, I had so much more time to address the issue and 2) it's hard to put yourself at the novice level after you've gained some expertise. I guess I could add I don't know if the person (who is in another department) must hand write or can use a computer for the exam; handwriting takes longer.  I should find out.

Any suggestions? I remember looking at my questions and seeing 2 of them with about 40 subsections - but again, I had 2 weeks to respond. This is a different ball game.

Thanks. 

[seniorscholar]

When I was dgs in the English department, I used to "suggest" to the chair of the committee that had submitted the 6 questions for the comps of a particular student (answer 3; nominal 6 hours for exam, though students aren't thrown out of the room until the grad secretary is ready to go home, which really gives them closer to 8) that any question with more than three subsections be revised and trimmed if they wanted to have comprehensive answers instead of thin overviews. The exams are now written on a computer.

Note that these are quite individual exams, on a reading list created/revised about every five years by the area committee but individually revised up to 30% by the student and the people who will be the student's dissertation committee. And each of the three people on the committee provides two questions; if it happens that there's too much overlap the chair asks for a new question from one of them and tinkers with the question submitted by the other to reflect the overlapping question. *These are the questions that often wind up being sent back for further revision by the dgs because they're too complicated.