The General Exam

Dear iSchool student,

This letter serves to convey to you what I know about General Examinations at the University of Washington’s Information School, as of Spring 2026. I will also provide details about the process I went through when completing the exam and some reflections on how mine went. I hope to help you prepare for your own.

Structure and Timing ♥0

The required components of the exam, per official iSchool policy, are:

1. submitting your final statement of interest and reading list to your committee,
2. your committee providing you with questions,
3. you submitting a written response,
4. a two-hour meeting with your committee to discuss your written response.

There are also requirements for when these components must occur. There must be two weeks between 2 and 3 above, and there must be between two and four weeks between 3 and 4. For 4, the meeting must occur within an academic quarter in which you are registered for credits.

While these components are the only required ones in my understanding of iSchool policy, your chair or members of your committee may have other expectations about the process of your exam. Many committees will expect that you will submit your finalized SOI and reading list a certain amount of time before they send you questions, for example, or that they will be allowed to provide feedback on your exam materials prior to submitting finalized versions. Given the flexibility that committees are allowed in determining the exam process, the details of my exam will be most likely to repeat themselves for students who work with Martin, Nic, or Emma, the iSchool members of my committee, and may be less relevant to those working in different areas.

Here is the timeline of major events in my exam process:

Preparing for the Exam (75 Days)

• 132 days to oral: Began drafting SOI
• 104 days to oral: Submitted draft 1 SOI to chair
• 100 days to oral: Received feedback on draft 1 SOI from advisor
• 90 days to oral: Submitted draft 2 SOI to chair
• 86 days to oral: Received feedback on draft 2 SOI from chair
• 86 days to oral: Submitted draft 3 SOI to committee
• 75 days to oral: Received feedback on draft 3 SOI from all committee members
• 67 days to oral: Submitted finalized SOI to committee
• 57 days to oral: Received written approval on SOI from all committee members

Scheduling (2 Days)

• 57 days to oral: Sent out email to schedule exam
• 55 days to oral: Received all responses for exam scheduling; set exam date and time

Exam (28 Days)

• 28 days to oral: Received written questions
• 14 days to oral: Submitted written component
• January 28th: Oral component of my general exam

Preparing for the Exam ♥0

To prepare for your exam, you are supposed to draft your statement of interest and read the works on your reading list. In practice, some students also begin the process of writing their responses in this time.

I eventually skimmed almost all of the works on my general exam reading list (abstract + intro + figures). I did a deeper read of works that were more interesting to me or particularly relevant to my statement. I tried to write a note for each paper, and eventually settled on the structure of answering the questions below. I didn’t always answer all the questions.

• What is this about? Paragraph describing the paper’s story and results to future me
• What did you learn? Paragraph or bullet points stating any beliefs I gained or sharpened through reading the paper
• Details? Bullet points describing details I wanted to remember about the paper’s data, methods, limitations, etc.
• Any further thoughts? Bullet points with whatever other thoughts came up for me as I was reading, e.g. how the work related to others on my list or project ideas the paper brought up.

At first as I was progressing through my readings, I was also working on my statement of interest. I did not read all of the works on my reading list before finalizing my SOI. I read many only after submitting my final SOI/reading list, a few during the exam itself, and there were a few I never read. I also read papers that had not made it onto my reading list in time.

While the statement of interest is supposed to be 1-2 pages, per iSchool policy, it is common for statements to be longer. I found that I wanted more room and so ended up with a statement that was a little over 4 pages. My understanding is that it is common to provide a draft statement of interest to your committee in advance of the finalized version. Before sharing the draft with your committee, you may share drafts with your chair. I am aware of some students who did not get any feedback from their committee or chair before finalizing their statement of interest, however. It is not a formal iSchool requirement to involve them in the drafting process, although many chairs expect it.

I felt like most of my committee members engaged substantively with my statement of interest, and that my statement improved through addressing their feedback. Surprisingly to me, the only committee member (other than my GSR) to not provide substantive feedback for my SOI was my chair. I think this was partly a product of the process: I was a week behind my planned schedule when submitting drafts, which may have given the sense that it would be better to not provide notes that would take more time to address. I also got the sense that my chair was trying to give me space to develop my writing independently, which for the most part I was grateful for. But nevertheless I would have preferred to receive both the space to develop my writing along with critiques of what I had produced. When I showed my draft to my committee more broadly, they gave me some feedback on the scoping of the SOI, some on the project ideas I proposed, some on the claims I made, and on the writing. I did not receive much feedback on my reading list from my committee (committee members suggested adding ~2 works each).

Concerning pre-writing, your chair or co-chairs may signal some of the questions to you in advance. Some students will use these signals to begin the process of writing their responses. I was not able to find the time in advance of my general exam to pre-write.

Finally, I’ll note that I was funded by my chair on an RAship in the quarter where I did most of my preparation. My chair had lower expectations for research output in this quarter, particularly during the time between finalizing my exam and receiving questions. This helped a lot with my preparation.

Writing the Written Component ♥0

When completing the written component of the exam, students write a set of long responses to the questions that have been posed to them by their committee. There is no format required by iSchool policy for the responses, although your committee may make requests to you concerning formatting when they give you the questions.

You may have heard that the exam will take your undivided intellectual attention. I had set up my exam such that I had very light external commitments while I was developing the written component (which I would recommend you push for as well, to the extent that you are able). I ended up using only a handful of hours for other things in the exam period, and most of my waking time was spent writing. My fiancé did nearly all of our shared household labor during the time. I also informed my family and friends beforehand that I would not be able to respond quickly to messages.

The questions on the exam, per iSchool policy, are intended to allow you to demonstrate that you have the requisite methodological expertise, topical expertise, and scoping skills to carry out a dissertation. My understanding is that committees like to include one conceptual question, one topical question, and one “plan a project” question. My chair pushed for me to include a “data analysis” component in my exam, but I asked him to not do so as I didn’t feel the exam was where I needed to develop that skill, and we agreed to make analysis limited or optional. I ended up including some light data analysis in my response to the “plan a project” question I received, as I felt doing so was the best way to answer the question.

My chair sent me the questions at 12:30pm on a Wednesday, and asked that I submit my responses by 12:30pm on the Wednesday two weeks later. My charge requested that I write between 3,000 and 5,000 words for each question. My final response was 9,222 words. I found the word count unproductive for what it’s worth, as it forced me to include fluff in my response that I would not have included otherwise. In the email containing my questions, my chair pointed me toward the relevant policies concerning what support was appropriate to get from others as I was writing my responses. I’m not sure of the norms around these things, e.g. if all chairs are as specific about the time you need to submit your response by, or make requests about the number of words your response should contain. The charges I’ve seen from my friends have not consistently requested the same.

After receiving the questions, I spent the first few days digesting and outlining my responses. I did this primarily in an overleaf document, but I also found it helpful to talk things over out loud (to myself or my fiancé), e.g. concerning what information a good response to the questions would need to convey. I considered requesting clarification in this time as well, as there were a few questions that read to me as ambiguous, but I eventually decided to do the clarification myself in my response. I did write a letter requesting clarification though (before deciding not to send) and much of the writing from that letter shaped my responses.

In writing my responses, I ended up using a bit of the notes I’d developed in my exam prep, but for the most part I had to develop new writing. I also spent a decent amount of time reading during the exam period, as I needed to pull out information from the papers that I hadn’t needed previously. I think I had a good sense of the structure I was going to use in my responses after the first week, along with about a third of the writing that would go into the final version. I found the writing to get easier over time, as the intellectual work shifted away from identifying the topics I wanted to touch on and claims I wanted to make to actually fleshing out those topics and claims. The structure of my responses didn’t change significantly after my first week.

In the last day or two I needed to jettison sections I hadn’t had time to finish and to then tie together the sections that remained. I pulled an all nighter on the Tuesday before the written component was due as part of that effort (yuck). The last thing I did before submitting was ask Claude to help me identify typos, rough transitions, ambiguous sentences, problems with verb tenses, and so on.

Looking again at my responses now, I’m proud of how each starts, but feel like they all trail off a bit in quality as they go along. I had wanted for each response to be, basically, a first draft for a paper that I and my committee would be interested in reading. I think the responses I turned in successfully identified what each of those papers would consist of, but didn’t flesh out the papers as much as I’d hoped. Two weeks is not a lot of time to write three papers from scratch! In retrospect I wish I had set the goal of simply answering my exam questions clearly and completely. My committee didn’t give me any trouble for the end product that I turned in, for what it’s worth. But I do think focusing more on responding to the questions themselves, rather than producing a set of self contained academic works, would have made my responses better and the process less stressful.

I submitted my responses to my committee by email one minute before they were due—12:29pm on a Wednesday.

Preparing for the Oral Component ♥0

In the time between submitting the written component and holding the oral component, students are expected to rest, reflect on what they have written, and prepare to discuss their questions and responses. It is common to check in with your chair in this time to discuss the structure of the general exam meeting. It is also common to reread your essays, to plan how you might explain and defend them, and to plan how you can respond to the questions your essays leave unanswered.

After submitting my exam, I took the rest of the day easy. I caught up on the critical tasks that I’d been putting off, went home early to be with my fiancé and walk my dog, and began getting my sleep schedule back to normal. I was not given any guidance from my committee until the following Monday on what to do next. I know of one professor who does give explicit, if very general, instructions for how to prepare for the oral component, but I am not sure of the norms more broadly.

When submitting my responses I had been concerned with the adequacy of what I had written, so I set up hangouts with friends who’d completed their exams in the next few days to help me gauge how valid my concern was. Kayla gave me the advice that I should first take time to decompress, and to wait until at least the following Monday to do anything exam related. She also told me that how the committee votes will be a reflection of not just the snapshot into my abilities that the exam provided, but also of the broader view of my abilities that my committee had from my time at UW. JaeWon told me that, like me, she had not sought to simply answer the exam questions when writing her responses. She said that she regretted this so much that she decided to use her oral exam time to present an augmented version of her written responses, more oriented toward addressing her exam’s questions directly.

I followed Kayla’s advice and did indeed set my exam aside until the following Monday. I met with my chair on that day, and we discussed how we would structure the meeting for the oral component. Coming into meeting with my chair I had wanted to follow a similar structure as JaeWon had—a longer presentation giving a restructured version of my written responses, with less time for discussion—but my chair pushed me to keep my presentation brief, and to use the meat of the exam for answering questions my committee posed. The structure we settled on was for him to introduce me, me to give a brief introduction of my responses overall, and then to split the following 90 minutes or so into three sections, one for each question. I was to give a 5 minute presentation rehashing my response at the start of each of these sections, then allow my committee to ask follow ups.

I prepared for the oral component by creating presentation materials and practicing what I would say in the meeting. I re-read my responses and came up with a set of questions my committee might ask, e.g. about claims that were confusing or poorly supported, parts of the exam questions that were not addressed in as much detail as I would have liked, or ideas from their feedback on my SOI that I anticipated them bringing up again. I then practiced answering these questions out loud. I also practiced giving my 5 minute rehashes.

The Oral Component ♥0

The iSchool’s general exam policy does not specify a structure for your oral exam meeting, beyond that the committee will hold a closed discussion and voting session toward the end of the exam, before conveying the outcome to you. My understanding is that the meetings also tend to consist of time where you reiterate your responses, along with time for questions and discussion.

I held my exam in one of the conference rooms in Allen Library South. I had asked my committee members in advance whether they were showing up remotely or in person, one of whom planned to show up remotely. While the official iSchool policy states that your GSR and a majority of your committee must be physically present, Andrea told me before the exam that it was in fact not necessary for my GSR to attend in person. For my remote member, I checked out a laptop from the library to embody them, so that I might use the TV in the room for presenting my slides.

On the day of, I got to the room early to set up my tech and put out snacks for those who came in person (which I ended up being the only one to eat!). My committee members all showed up on time, and my chair began the meeting with a very brief introduction where he stated the purpose and required components of the exam, before informing the committee about the structure he and I had agreed to for how we would spend the time.

I only ended up giving 2/3 of my rehashes in the exam and kept those I did give briefer than I’d planned, as it seemed the committee did not really need them. We ended up spending most of the time on open ended discussion. I did not refer much to the slides I had created.

I felt like my committee posed worthwhile questions, and I enjoyed talking over the answers with them. Some questions were about my research interests and career plans, some were about how I might solve hypothetical research problems, some were about writing decisions I’d made, some were about what I’d meant in my writing, and some were about what I’d learned in my reading. I was glad I had followed my chair’s suggestion and not planned a longer presentation, as I felt I got a lot out of the conversation. Dr. Madeleine Daepp had told me prior to my exam that given all the preparation and pre-thought, I would rarely get to feel as smart as I did during the oral component. I found that to be true! It was rewarding to voice ideas that I had been sharpening over the past few months to an audience interested in hearing those ideas and helping me improve them.

Final Thoughts ♥0

You have likely heard that it is rare for students to not pass their general exam. This is true as far as I am aware; I only know of one student who had to do a retake, and they passed once they did so.

You may also have heard that it is common for students to worry about not passing. I have by chance run into three of my friends in the days before their oral exams. Each one was convinced that there was a meaningful chance they would not pass, and each one seemed both more exhausted and more worried than I had ever seen them. Personally, my resting heart rate was about 10bpm higher than usual in the weeks of the exam. It indeed can be a very stressful time. But people get through it.

The exam can be worthwhile and productive. It should provide you with time to think; time to figure out how to convey your thoughts to others; and time to develop a broad set of capacities, skills, and ideas. Your colleagues and committee should give you space to do that development. Your committee, who during the day-to-day of your PhD studies may be most concerned with helping you produce impactful research, should shift their focus somewhat to the task of helping you develop as a scholar. I feel proud of what I produced in my own exam, and am grateful for the opportunity it gave me to improve myself.

Now with all that said, I’d like to share some advice with you that I received from JaeWon.

You will pass the general exam. Your goals should just be to make yourself feel like you’ve earned it and to make your committee feel excited about voting for you to go through.

I wish you the best of luck with the process.

Isaac Slaughter

P.S. If you are interested in seeing my statement of interest or other exam materials, please reach out!

P.P.S. Here are some relevant links: iSchool General Exam Policy and iSchool Advising Canvas Page.