CQE
What is CQE?
A major milestone for PhD students is to pass the Comprehensive Qualifying Exam (CQE). The CQE is a comprehensive oral exam that primarily includes a research component as well as technical questions regarding core courses. The student submits a standard IEEE conference paper format document describing their research and delivers an oral presentation describing a research problem. Following the presentation two faculty members will question the student on their understanding of their subject.
Recent CQE Instructions
The following two links are recent CQE instructions. Every year, the instruction will be sent out around April and October. It includes the submission timeline and grading criteria.
Presentation Guideline for CQE
Presentation structure:
Introduction/motivation (why): a clearly defined problem and the identified gap in existing literature.
Your approach (how): a technically sound approach to formulate and solve the problem.
Result: some results that show your approach works. It doesn’t need to be conference-level results that contain multiple experiments.
Future plan: current challenges and plan for the coming years.
Length: The presentation should be 25-30 minutes in length. Leave time for examiners to ask questions.
Keep in mind
Your presentation and communication skills are much more influential than your particular research topic/results.
Convince your examiners you are research-ready, you can publish, you know what you talk about, and you have sufficient understanding of existing literature in your area.
Take questions and comments without getting defensive.
Sample Questions for CQE
Some common questions asked by examiners:
In what condition will your method fail? What’s your observation on failure cases?
What will be the performance of your method in “this condition”?
Did you compare it with “this other method”? Is your method better than that?
Why not use “this method” so we don’t need your method? (Big area topic, not specific work)
Why did you choose this specific design choice?
Can you explain more on …?
Your motivation can be better, is there any other reason to do…
What is the main challenge to deploy.... to..
What if xxx assumption is violated?
