Send an email to dcbrown@vt.edu by 12/4 to sign up for the exam. Please include [Qualifier_Spring_2024] in the subject of the email. The content of the email must include: (1) your enrollment year, (2) your research area, and (3) your advisor.
Note that this qualifier exam is exclusively for students invovled in Software Engineering Research. You may withdraw from the exam without penalty (contact Dr. Brown) up until when the reading list is due (12/19). From that point, you are committed to being scored unless some extraordinary event intervenes.
The goal of this qualifier is to assess the participating students' knowledge and comfort in the sub-area of Software engineering in which they aim to pursue their research in. Awarenesss of state-of-the-art research are key elements to incubate and foster impactful reserach ideas. The exam will consist of two main components:
(1) Written Component. Every student will select a total of 6 papers of their choice. Papers must be highly relavent to their reserach area. One recommended criteria is to pick papers that are mostly likely to form a solid foundation for their future research. Students must submit the list of papers by 12/19.
Students are required to write a 5-page IEEE conference formatted report with an insightful literature survey for all six selected papers. References will not be counted towards the page limit. You will organize your paper as follows:
The questions will likely require the student to synthesize a subset of the body of work as embodied by these papers into a coherent framework, and/or make some proposal on how to move the research or state of the practice forward.
(2) Oral Component. After the written material has been submitted to the committee, each student will give a 15 minutes oral presentation. This component will focus on the high-level takeaways of the selected papers focusing on an overview of the research and what you learned from the survey. In addition, your talk should include an overview of how the papers relate to your existing work (if applicable) and future research directions. The presentation will comprise of a 15 minutes of oral presentation in-person and 5 minutes of Q/A from the committee and audience members.
The grading policy is as below:
The answers submitted by every student to the qualifier questions should reflect their own individual effort. Therefore, discussions of the writing prompt once it has been posted are prohibited among students. This examination is conducted under the University’s Graduate Honor System Code. Students are encouraged to draw from other papers than those listed in the exam to the extent that this strengthens their arguments. However, the answers submitted must represent the sole and complete work of the student submitting the answers. Material substantially derived from other works, whether published in print or found on the web, must be explicitly and fully cited. Your grade will be more strongly influenced by arguments you make rather than arguments you quote or cite.