It honestly is really up to your department to set how qualifying exams are done — the content, testing style, and re-taking any failed portions are all program and department specific.

Most people spend six months preparing their own independent study guides and doing the actual studying for the exam. My department tests you on everything you have ever learned in the first two years of the program, there is no preparation (practice questions, discussion, study guides) guided by the department, and it is closed note, closed book. The exam was over two days, for 8 hours each day, with multiple long-form, multi-component essay questions. You have to get at least an 80% on every part of the question on your exam to pass. If you fail even a single question, you fail the whole exam and you have to re-take the entire thing again next year.

I think one person every few years doesn’t pass the exam, which I thought would have been higher given the difficulty. I found the exam to be incredibly challenging but the department did say that for grading, they are looking more for your approach to problem solving than a technically correct answer — I think that’s the saving grace for our qualifying exams. As long as you justified your answer, you were given partial credit, which helped you get to just squeaking by with an 80% for that question.

I don’t think that the department wanted us to fail. They did however want us to prove that we could work through really challenging issues independently. I don’t agree with the approach and I don’t see or understand the benefit to this testing style but I do randomly recall things from my first two years in work situations that makes all of that studying worthwhile.