A lot of it is historical accidents + inertia. When I was a greenhorn at UCLA, CS quals (the WQE, aka “the wookie”) were two 5 hour tests (on two consecutive days) covering all of CS (e.g. networking, databases, AI, theory, systems, everything). They were not easy at all. At some point it was realized this was stupid, and neither teaches nor prepares one for research, and washes out good people. So it was changed.
That sounds a lot like Technion’s course exams, which were usually designed to be two “levels” harder than the entire rest of the course, and could only really be studied for by obtaining graded copies of old exams.
A lot of it is historical accidents + inertia. When I was a greenhorn at UCLA, CS quals (the WQE, aka “the wookie”) were two 5 hour tests (on two consecutive days) covering all of CS (e.g. networking, databases, AI, theory, systems, everything). They were not easy at all. At some point it was realized this was stupid, and neither teaches nor prepares one for research, and washes out good people. So it was changed.
UCLA math quals are .. formidable.
That sounds a lot like Technion’s course exams, which were usually designed to be two “levels” harder than the entire rest of the course, and could only really be studied for by obtaining graded copies of old exams.