University of Virginia Library

Can Comps

The concept of requiring final comprehensive
examinations before awarding students'
degrees seems logical enough. After all,
who would deny that an institution has a
right (and an obligation) to make certain that
the degrees it awards are reflective of the
knowledge and effort they imply? On the
other hand, when such exams are required in
conjunction with a rigid curriculum of the
sort we have here, they become ridiculous and
burdensome.

To graduate from the College - it alone
still requires comps for an undergraduate
degree - one must take 120 hours of specified
courses, maintain a 2.0 cumulative average in
them, fulfill whatever course requirements his
major department sets for him, and then pass
a "comprehensive" examination on his major
subject while he is still taking courses in it.
Only if the curriculum were a free or open
one, with provision for independent study not
oriented to classes, figures, and averages,
would the comps be justified. As it is now,
they are hardly "comprehensive," and they
are little more than an unnatural imposition
on the degree applicant as he winds up his
effort to gratify the figures and averages.

Major requirements in the College are such
that every student must take courses which, in
number and content, necessarily give him as
comprehensive an exposure to the subject as
possible. It is reasonable to assume that he has
mastered a portion of a subject when he
receives an acceptable grade in the course
concerned with it. Thus it is reasonable to
assume that he has mastered the whole subject
when he has received acceptable grades in all
the courses he takes in it. In other words, if he
is required to take and pass a comprehensive
workload, why, then must he pass a comprehensive
examination to see if he really learned
what his course grades indicate?

More practically, comps are a tremendous
and dangerous burden on degree applicants.
Few take overloads, so they must pass all their
courses in the last semester - major courses,
related courses, and electives - if they are to
graduate on time. And yet they must stop
working on those courses less than a month
before the exams in them to learn or re-learn a
lot of material to a point of familiarity they
cannot hope to maintain. Further, in many
cases they are required to address themselves
to material they have never covered in a
course. For example, in English a fourth-year
student this year may well have to read and
study on his own works he has never read
before. Such an arrangement produces a situation
in which students are forced to try to
pick their courses to prepare themselves for
one short examination.

No matter how well a student has filled
his course requirements he must still pass his
comps to graduate. Thus we are faced with
the prospect of a 4.0 student who is not
awarded his degree. And we are left with
"lame duck" students who have passed comprehensive
examinations on their major subjects
but who must still face and pass four or
five three-hour exams after them to graduate.
The absurdity of the situation is obvious.
Surely the comps are an anachronistic holdover
from some other arrangement, for they
are little more than perfunctory, and hardly
reasonable or realistic, today.

Even if degree requirements were not so
rigid as they are here - if the possibility for
more free study, for example, did exist - the
ends achieved by comprehensive examinations
could still be attained better otherwise. Many
schools substitute a type of paper or thesis for
the comprehensive requirement. Some departments
feel they can learn more about their
students' preparation from the appropriate
section of the Graduate Record Exam than
they can from any test of local origin. Some
schools which cling to comps do not require
final exams for seniors.

In short, until our curriculum is altered
significantly, comprehensive examinations
would serve everyone best abolished. They are
superfluous and unrealistic; they are contrived
and burdensome; worst, they are a threat to
an individual student's ultimate success in the
curriculum as it stands now; and there are
plenty of better alternative means to the same
end available. We urge the curriculum evaluation
committee to consider this matter carefully
and to recommend the abolition of
comprehensive examinations beginning this
year, or at least to recommend some of the
alternatives available.