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Q: Who should I talk to if I have questions leading up to the MA Comprehensive Exam?

A: Please reach out to the Graduate Advisor, the MA Comprehensive Exam Committee, or the Education Program Assistant if you have questions about exam policies and procedures. Departmental and university policies and procedures may change from time to time, so you will get more accurate information from official sources than from classmates or prior MA Comprehensive Exam takers.

Q: When is the MA Exam?

A: The exam date changes every semester. Usually the exam must be completed no later than the middle of November or March, but it often occurs a couple of weeks before these official graduate school deadlines (i.e. before fall or spring break). Pay attention to messages from the Education Program Assistant at the beginning of the semester and be sure to let her know if you plan to take the exam in a given semester. If you do so you will be kept informed of the exam date for that semester.

Q: How do I sign up for the exam?

A: The graduate school has a deadline for submitting the Master’s Final Examination Form well in advance of the exam date, so it is important to pay attention to messages about the exam and to let the Education Program Assistant know at the beginning of the semester when you plan to take the exam. Keep an eye out for email messages about taking the exam in the semester when you plan to take it and be sure to respond promptly to sign up and follow any instructions throughout the semester about forms and scheduling in a timely manner.

Q: How long is the exam?

A: The exam is allotted a four hour time block. Bear in mind that the exam covers five core areas of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology & syntax, semantics, and diachronic linguistics), which means you will have approximately 45 minutes per section. Managing your time during the exam is important, as students regularly take the full 4 hours to complete the exam.

Q: How should I study for the exam?

A: You are free to decide what study options work best for you. As a general rule, we have found that strong note-taking skills are important for success on the exam, so we recommend taking notes that make sense to you in your MA courses and reviewing those notes over plenty of time leading up to the exam. Relying on course slides, handouts, or general web resources without using your own notes to help you remember important concepts and details is a less successful study strategy in our experience. 

The Department does not hold any official review sessions or provide study guides for the exam, but you are free to collaborate with your peers to organize collaborative study sessions. To gain a sense of how the exam is structured and what sorts of question formats you might encounter, you can obtain a selection of sample exams by emailing the Education Program Assistant. Please note that you are expected not to obtain exam questions from other students and are expected not to share any exam questions with others. Only exam samples provided directly from the Education Program Assistant should be used in your preparation.

Q: If I have been approved for test-taking accommodations by Disability Services, such as extra time or use of assistive devices, will these accommodations be made for the MA Comprehensive Exam?

A: The MA Comprehensive Exam Committee will need to work with Disability Services on a case-by-case basis to make sure appropriate accommodations are implemented for your exam. If you have a disability that may require exam accommodations, please notify the Education Program Assistant at the time you sign up for the exam so that the Exam Committee will have time to coordinate with Disability Services and make all appropriate arrangements.

Q: Can I use my notes during the exam?

A: No notes are allowed in the exam. You will be provided with blank scratch paper that you can use to work through material on the exam if you choose, which you will hand in to the exam proctors when you finish. You may have heard from other students that the exam is open-note; it is not. Procedures for many graduate program milestones have changed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, so the experiences of other students are not a reliable indicator of what you can expect. Please reach out to the Graduate Advisor, the MA Comprehensive Exam Committee, or the Education Program Assistant  if you have questions about policies and procedures instead of relying on word of mouth.

Q: Can I consult other resources like an IPA chart or a textbook during the exam?

A: You will not be able to access materials such as IPA charts, textbooks, or web resources of any kind during the exam. The exam proctors will be able to answer clarifying questions if any data or questions in the exam are unclear to you.

Q: What is the format of the exam?

A: The exam is a written exam administered in person. It contains questions from five areas of linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology & syntax, semantics, and diachronic linguistics. You should expect to see a mix of data-analysis problems and theoretical questions. For some sections of the exam you may be able to select questions to answer from a larger set of options. You will submit your exam in the form of a digital document in which you have typed your answers to each section of the exam. In some cases you may be able to submit additional handwritten pages on paper provided by the proctors (e.g. if an answer requires a diagram). You must include your name in your digital submission and on all handwritten pages you choose to submit.

Q; What happens if the exam questions cover material that was not covered in the particular course I took on that topic?

The core courses whose material is covered on the MA Comprehensive Exam are taught by different faculty members over time and occasionally experience disruptions (notably during the COVID-19 pandemic). Rest assured that there are safeguards in place to ensure that you are not held responsible on the MA Comprehensive Exam for material that was not covered in your courses. 

One important safeguard is question selection. Many sections of the exam allow test-takers to select questions to answer from a larger set of options. In semesters where students taking the exam were taught by different instructors, this allows test-takers to avoid questions that may have been well covered in a core course in a different semester but were not given as much attention in one particular semester.

Another safeguard is faculty vetting of the exam. Questions are written by Linguistics faculty who teach courses in the five core areas and the exam is reviewed by the MA Comprehensive Exam Committee prior to its administration to ensure that it covers material from the core curriculum. When multiple instructors have taught the core courses to members of a semester’s cohort of test-takers, all relevant instructors are typically asked to review the questions for a section and are allowed to propose questions.

Finally, the availability of sample exams allows students to see the sorts of material they are responsible for and to ask questions prior to the exam. Historically, individual preparation is the most important predictor of success on exam questions.

Q: Do I need to know the linguistic terminology used in my core courses, or can I describe linguistic concepts in my own words on the exam?

You should be prepared to discuss linguistic phenomena using the terminology that is standard in the field. Some questions may ask you to discuss concepts in your own words, but others will ask you to remember terms and be able to discuss the concepts they are used for. You will be most successful in demonstrating understanding of core material if you are able to discuss concepts in ways that make sense to other linguists, including using linguistic terminology.

Q: What do I do if I don’t understand what an exam question is asking?

A: You can ask the exam proctors to clarify things like question wording or non-standard orthographic conventions. In fact, you are encouraged to ask for clarification during the exam if you are uncertain what is being asked of you. However, proctors can only provide clarification; they cannot define core linguistic terminology, confirm your responses, or answer questions about the concepts you are being examined on.

Q: Do I get extra credit if I answer more questions than I am required to in sections where I have a choice of questions?

A: No. Answer exactly as many questions as you are told to answer. If you answer more questions than you are asked to answer they will be graded in the order that you present them and only the number of questions you were asked to answer will be graded. Any additional answers you include will not be graded.

A: How quickly will I know if I have passed the exam?

Scoring the MA Exam takes several days, especially in semesters that have many students signed up for the exam. You may not hear for 10+ days what the outcome of the exam is. If you have not been notified of the exam outcome by 2 weeks after the exam date you may contact the MA Comprehensive Exam Committee to inquire about your results.

Q; What happens if I do not pass?

If you do not provide adequate answers for some sections of the exam you may be asked to revise your exam at the discretion of the committee. If this happens the committee will devise an exam revision option tailored to allow you to demonstrate further knowledge in areas where your responses were inadequate or unclear. This may take the form of a proctored exam, a take-home exam, or an oral exam, depending on what modality the committee believes will best demonstrate understanding of concepts that were not clearly described or analyzed on the original exam. The questions you are asked in the exam revision may be the same as or different from the ones you answered on the original exam. Be sure to pay close attention to the instructions and questions in an exam revision, as you may be asked different questions about the same datasets that you analyzed in your original exam.

If you do not pass the exam after one attempt and an associated revision, your non-passing result will be submitted to the graduate school. In this case, you are allowed one more chance to retake the exam in the following semester. To be eligible for a second official attempt at the exam you must maintain your MA Degree Candidate status by registering for a one-credit placeholder course that semester. If you plan to make a second attempt at the exam you should consult the Education Program Assistant immediately after you receive the results from your first exam to arrange for continuing registration as a MA Degree Candidate.

Q: If I do not pass the exam, will the committee tell me how I need to improve my answers in order to pass on my next exam attempt? 

A: You are welcome to reach out to the MA Comprehensive Exam Committee to ask questions about your responses and why they were not adequate for a “pass” designation on individual sections of the exam. The committee can answer questions about your own answers and will provide an evaluation form for non-passing exams that briefly summarizes the primary reasons for non-passing scores on individual exam sections. However, because a range of responses may be considered passing, they will not be able to provide comprehensive feedback on all potentially deficient responses, outline a ‘perfect’ response, or provide specific instructions for passing a future iteration of the exam. We encourage you to avail yourself of faculty office hours to ask questions about material in the core curriculum both in your preparation for your first exam attempt and in the event that you must re-take the exam in a subsequent semester.

Q: Can I tell other students what is on the exam?

A: You may discuss in general terms the sorts of concepts and phenomena you were asked to engage with, but you may not share exam questions or data (from your own exam or any other CU Linguistics MA Comprehensive Exam) with other students.