I have some strong opinions about how best to study for comps that come both from my own comps but also from years of coming up with comps questions & administering comps at Notre Dame. So, a thread:
Students generally worry about reading and retaining the material. I know I did. But that's putting the focus on the wrong part of the process. The bigger question is, can you use the material in an interesting way.
So let me back up for a minute. When done properly, studying for comps is a very useful experience, one which stays with you. When I was on the job market, doing interviews, I used a lot of both my comps material and the experience of taking the exam in job talks.
In part this is because my comps were oral. The Harvard Govt faculty noticed that the students had converged on a set of safe answers (we could generally figure out what the range of possible questions were) and so everybody sounded the same. To short circuit that, they switched
To oral comps. Which were both more stressful and more interesting. Because they would ask you a question, and as soon as they could see where you were going, they would cut you off and ask another. So the 30 minutes of CP comps was really 2 hours of intense discussion.
And you had to be light on your feet, much like a job talk. This is the direction I'd like to point people in. At ND, it was a classic written exam, and most students would see a question and think that their task was to demonstrate mastery & so
they would answer as comprehensively as possible. Basically a brain dump to show you that they had read the material and could recall it. But that approach failed to demonstrate the ability to synthesize the material & more importantly didn't show the student could deploy it.
HERE'S WHAT I SUGGEST: From the very beginning, start answering questions. Make them up and answer them. Do this collaboratively - come up with questions (which is half of the learning) and ask them of each other & evaluate each other.
This is brutal and stressful. You'll realize how little you know, especially if you start doing this from week one. That's OK. The point is to force you to make connections & to realize that this material is not here to be memorized but instead to be used to explain the world.
One classic question in the orals was to ask you how you would use the material to explain something that had just happened recently in the world. Which theory explained better? Why? What are the observable implications of different theories? How do they connect to this event?
Students should be able to organize the material into large chunks that are similar in different ways. Sometimes levels of analysis, sometimes approach, sometimes assumption. The next step is to use this stuff. It has to become a tool in your hands.
What do we expect will happen next in Zimbabwe? How do we best understand what is happening in Ethiopia? Or, a bit more lit focused. What do theories of democratization lead us to believe about Africa? What are the big fissures in the lit? Why? How does evidence talk to theory?
Seriously, we used to hold multi hour study sessions once a week. And we would ask these questions back and forth. I didn't actually read that much new material. I had notes from the previous 4 yrs & I had what I remembered from the field seminar. The focus was on digesting.
Now this varies with written exams, and I don't know what Yale questions are like. But I know what I asked at ND, and what questions other people asked. Here again, coming up with your own questions really helps you learn because you have to deconstruct the exam process.
I tended towards multipart questions because I wanted to make sure a nervous student could see the contours of the problem. I usually ended with "if you had an ample budget, how would you try to study some part of what you discussed"
I really wanted to drive students towards the observable implications of different theoretical claims, and for them to think of the rungs on the ladder between abstract theory and actual human behavior.
I've kinda run out of steam here. But the key is to deconstruct the exam, come up with questions, practice answering them from day one, focus on making an argument that synthesizes & uses the material. END
