The Technical Qualifying Exam
The TQE is a departmental exam which involves proving competence in four subjects, as follows:
- Demonstrating mastery of two EECS undergraduate subjects by taking exams, normally at the end of the spring of the first year. Area I students most typically take the exams in 6.003 (Signals and Systems) and 6.041 (Applied Probability), though this is not a requirement. The graduate office maintains the list of choices.
- Passing two eligible graduate EECS subjects with high marks. Note that most (but, perhaps paradoxically, not all) of the core Area I graduate subjects listed in the previous section can be used to satisfy the graduate portion of the TQE. When planning your first choices, check with the graduate office to be sure which are eligible for TQE designation. TQE Subject List.
The undergraduate exams are graded S (Satisfactory), M (Marginal), and U (Unsatisfactory), which may be regarded as corresponding A, B, and C, respectively. The TQE is passed immediately and no oral exam component is required if a student gets either 4 A’s, or 3 A’s and a B. If a student does not meet this grade threshold, they proceed to the next portion of the exam, in which follow-up oral exam(s) are taken in the area(s) of identified weakness until adequate competence is demonstrated. It should be emphasized that there is no shame in taking an oral exam; until relatively recently in our department’s history all graduate students took an oral exam. The current TQE format simply removes this component of the exam for the subset of students for whom there is already evidence that their backgrounds are sufficiently sound to proceed.