Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: AGU Advances
Most faculty can remember their own qualifying exams as graduate students and have since administered many more, but is there method to this milestone in graduate education?
Exam processes vary widely among academic departments, mostly according to each institution’s tradition and with few data on outcomes. Sadly, the qualifying exam is often a point of failure for retention of underrepresented students. Lack of clarity of expectations, processes, and assessments may pose obstacles for students with marginalized identities in science. Women are more likely to fail than men; international students fail more than domestic students; and few data exist for other minority identities.
The first step towards improvement is to collect and analyze data, which surprisingly few departments do. Dove et al. [2024] discuss eleven more steps of evidence-based practices to align examination processes to values of graduate education. With this roadmap, faculty and administrators can re-examine their qualifying exam outcomes.
Citation: Dove, L. A., Singer, C. E., & Murphy, S. E. (2024). Bringing a lens of equity to geoscience qualifying examinations. AGU Advances, 5, e2024AV001260. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024AV001260
—Eric Davidson, Editor, AGU Advances