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You are free to decide what study options work best for you. The Department encourages students to organize collaborative study sessions with their peers.

We also highly recommend taking notes in your MA courses that you can review, alongside course slides, handouts, and other materials, as you prepare for the exam.Ìý

The Department can provide a selection of sample exams to give you an idea of what to expect. Only exam samples provided by the Department should be used in your preparation. You should not request exam questions from other students or share any exam questions afterwards.

Comps is a written exam taken in person. It is administered in a computer lab on campus and completed exams are submitted electronically. In some cases you may be able to submit additional handwritten pages on paper provided by the proctor (e.g. if an answer requires a diagram).

It contains questions from five areas of linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology & syntax, semantics, and diachronic linguistics. You should expect to see a mix of data-analysis problems and theoretical questions. For some sections of the exam you may be able to select questions to answer from a larger set of options.Ìý

The exam is allotted a four-hour time block. It includes questions covering the five core areas of linguistics, so you should plan approximately 45 minutes to complete each section.Ìý

Please inform Grad Program Administrator of any approved accommodations so that the Comps committee can work with Disability Services and make all appropriate arrangements.

No notes are allowed in the exam. You will receive blank scratch paper to use during the exam if you choose, and will hand it in to the exam proctor when you finish.Ìý

You will not be able to access any outside materials or web resources during the exam. The exam proctors will be able to answer clarifying questions if any data or questions in the exam are unclear to you.

Core linguistics courses may be taught by different faculty members over time. The Comps committee works to ensure that you are not held responsible on the exam for material that may not have been covered when you took a particular course.Ìý

Safeguards include:

• Sections of the exam that allow test-takers to select questions from a larger set of options;Ìý

• Faculty vetting of the exam - questions are written by faculty who teach the five core area courses and the exam is reviewed by the Comps exam committee to ensure it covers material from the core curriculum;

• Providing sample exams so students can see the sorts of material they will be responsible for and ask questions prior to the exam.Ìý

While some questions may ask you to discuss concepts in your own words, you are expected to discuss linguistic phenomena and concepts in ways that make sense to other linguists, which includes using the terminology that is standard in the field.

You can and should ask the exam proctor to clarify things like question wording or non-standard orthographic conventions. However, proctors can only provide clarification; they cannot define core linguistic terminology, confirm your responses, or answer questions about the concepts you are being examined on.

No. You should only answer the required number of questions for a given section. If you answer more questions than required, the committee will only grade your answers to the number of questions required, in the order that you present them.

Evaluation of the Comps exam takes several days, especially in semesters in which many students take the exam. The committee will inform you of the results as quickly as possible and you will receive feedback on the MA Comps Exam Milestone form.

If you do not provide adequate answers for some sections of the exam, the committee may ask you to revise your exam. They will use the MA Comps Exam Milestone form to provide feedback that briefly summarizes the primary reasons for non-passing scores on individual exam sections, and will offer a revision option that allows you to demonstrate further knowledge of any areas where your responses were inadequate or unclear.Ìý

Revision may include the same or different questions from those on the original exam and take the form of a proctored exam, a take-home exam, or an oral exam, depending on which modality the committee believes will best demonstrate your understanding of concepts that were not clearly described or analyzed.Ìý

Be sure to pay close attention to the instructions and questions in an exam revision.

In the event you do not pass the exam after one attempt and an associated revision, your non-passing result will be submitted to the graduate school. You are allowed one more chance to retake the exam in the following semester. To be eligible for a second official attempt at the exam, you must maintain your MA student status by asking the Grad Program Administrator to register you for the one-credit placeholder course LING 6940 (Master's Candidate for Degree) that semester.Ìý

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You may discuss in general terms the sorts of concepts and phenomena you were asked to engage with, but you may not share exam questions or data (from your own exam or any other CU Linguistics MA Comprehensive exam) with other students.