A student majoring in English is required to pass a comprehensive examination, which must be taken in the final semester.
The English Comprehensive Exam will now be a 40-minute oral exam with two faculty examiners. Don’t worry: students who have been selecting courses and working with the current model in mind will be equally ready for the new form of the comp. If you’ve been preparing for the written comp, you’ve been preparing for the oral comp as well.
How will this work?
Senior majors will fill out a form at the start of their comping semester. On that form, they will:
Check all the available times listed (during a week of the same March comp period in which the English comp has historically happened) that they could be free for an oral exam;
Choose at least two literary-historical periods (from the following seven: Medieval, Renaissance (including Shakespeare), Restoration/18th-c. British, 19th-c British, Pre-1900 American, Post-1900 American, and Post-1900 British and World Anglophone) that they’d be comfortable talking about in an exam;
Choose (from a list of around 15) at least two thematic/generic topics that they’d be comfortable discussing (these will be topics like lyric, epic, comedy, narrative, etc.);
Provide titles and brief 150-word abstracts of 4-6 essays they’ve written that they’d be happy to revisit.
Using the first two selections, we will match comping students with two examiners whose availability and expertise line up. Students will each be given a time/day to reserve for their exam, and they will learn who their examiners are on the day of the exam.
The exam itself:
Examiners will open with some general questions to draw out what you know and enjoy about the choices you’ve made, and then they will attempt to guide you with follow-up questions in a way that lets you show both breadth and depth of knowledge.
If we see you only talking about one narrow area, we’ll likely nudge you into some conversation about another one. If we see you staying on the surface of the texts, we’ll invite you to linger and consider a detail from more than one angle. If we ask you about a text you don’t know, just let us know as much, and we’ll switch gears.
Depending on the examiners, you may be presented with a short passage for close reading, or we may ask you to connect one of your essays to some other text we know you’ve read.
Our job is to make sure you have the opportunity to show us what you know and how you can think with what you’ve learned.
Scoring:
Students can earn up to a certain number of points by accurately recalling details, dates, titles, characters, and by properly using literary critical terminology to describe works within the selected exam categories.
In order to pass, however, examinees must also move beyond the recollection and description, and show how you interpret and analyze literary texts. You can earn some points for making an interpretive claim that is valid and apt, and you earn more points for thinking creatively and making claims or connections that are a bit more interesting, complex, bold, or nuanced.
So a passing grade must reflect both breadth and depth–the ability to speak knowledgeably across the categories you’ve selected and to hazard some good interpretive claims in a conversation about those ideas.
Distinction:
If you want to be considered for distinction, you must select more than two historical periods and more than two generic/thematic topics. The exam will be the same length as other exams, but you will have more opportunities to show some depth of knowledge and fluency across multiple categories.
All of the scores of students eligible for distinction will be anonymized and the department will draw a line wherever there is a natural division between the very highest scores and the next echelon.
If you are a senior with questions or concerns about the comprehensive exam, contact the department chair Dr. Jennifer Michael.
Easter 2026 english comprehensive exam
Saturday, March 21
Gailor Hall (Rooms 103, 110, 112, 144, and 019)*
8:00am-1:00pm
Five blue books are required for the taking of the exam. If you have an accommodation for extra time, please contact Dr. Irvin.
There will be a Comprehensive Exam Information Session on Wednesday, February 4, 2026, at 7 PM in Naylor Auditorium in Gailor Hall.
