APH 5124 - Psychophysiology Department Comprehensive Exam

For each comprehensive examination, each professor who has taught a lecture course to the student submits two essay questions for each of the lecture courses they teach in the program. The student selects one of the two questions for each course to answer. The questions must be designed so they can be answered within two double spaced typed pages using 12- point font size characters. The questions must test the student’s understanding of a crucial basic concept and the student’s ability to apply that concept to applied psychophysiology rather than requiring a list of facts.

The examination is open book as it deals with understanding and applying concepts rather than listing facts. The facts supporting the answer must be written as part of each answer. The student being tested arranges a test date with the program’s chair. On the date of the exam, the director e-mails the exam to the student and the student has 48 hours to email the answers to the director. No answers are accepted after the 48-hour limit. The student may not contact anybody who could help with the exam in any way, including faculty members who supplied the exam questions, during the exam period without explicit, written permission from the chair. When the student emails the answered exam to the director, the director emails the answers to the faculty member who supplied the question unless the faculty member has supplied an acceptable answer. Faculty members have two weeks to grade the exam. Questions are graded only pass or fail. If an answer is rated as a failure, the faculty member must provide a brief critique explaining why the answer failed.

The student must pass 80% of the questions to pass the exam. A student who fails the comprehensive may attempt questions from the failed subject areas twice with not less than one month between each attempt. Different questions are supplied to the student for each attempt. If the student does not pass on the third attempt (the original and two retries), the student is dropped from the program. The student can appeal grading of an answer first to the department chair and then to the Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs. 0 credit(s)