Candidacy and Dissertation
Preliminary Exams
The student must fulfill the requirements for the departmental Qualifying Examination within three years of enrollment in the doctoral program. The Qualifying Examination is organized and administered by the student’s academic advisor. The faculty prepares a written test based on at least two areas of concentration related to the student’s intended dissertation area. Questions will be drawn from regularly scheduled 400- and 500-level graduate courses at SIUC. The grade for the exam will be on a pass or fail basis for each subject area. If a student fails to pass any subject area of the written examination, a second chance is given for the failed topic test. Students who fail the Qualifying Examination after two attempts will be dismissed from the PhD program.
Dissertation Proposal and Candidacy
Having passed the qualifying exams and after completion of most of the course requirements, a student will begin working on a dissertation proposal. The next step will be a Preliminary Examination consisting of an oral test on the student’s proposed research topic. The student will pass the Preliminary Examination only if the members of the committee, with at most one exception, judge the performance of the student’s oral examination to be satisfactory. In the event the student’s performance is unsatisfactory, the committee will reschedule the exam for a later time. A student who fails the reexamination will be dismissed from the PhD program.
Dissertation and Defense
A dissertation is written under the direction of the student’s dissertation advisor and the student’s graduate committee. The dissertation must be prepared in accordance to the “Guidelines for Dissertations, Theses and Research Papers” of the SIUC Graduate School.
A student will be officially admitted to candidacy for the PhD after passing the Preliminary Exam and upon completion of all coursework. The student must then complete 24 credit hours of dissertation credit, restricted to nine hours per semester. When the research is complete and the dissertation is written, a final oral examination will take place to determine if the research conducted is worthy of the PhD. The dissertation must conform to high literary and scholastic standards and comply with all the relevant requirements of the Graduate School. The dissertation must represent original research of good quality. From the dissertation, the candidate should publish (or have accepted for publication) a minimum of two articles in peer-reviewed publications. The candidate must be listed as the primary author of at least one of these journal articles.
Each candidate must pass a final oral exam over the candidate’s dissertation conducted by the candidate’s Dissertation Committee. The dissertation will be accepted provided the dissertation advisor and at least three of the other four members of the committee so agree.
