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Ph.D. Degree

• Ph.D. Degree Requirements
  1. The supervising committee. Each doctoral student will have a supervising committee appointed. The primary functions of this committee are to suggest course work, to administer the preliminary and final examinations, and to oversee and evaluate the research of the candidate.

     The committee will consist of 5 members, at least three (3) members of the computer science department faculty and at least one (1) non-computer science graduate faculty member.

  2. Course work.
     • A total of at least 72 credit hours must be completed.
     • A minimum of 42 of these credit hours must be completed as course work.
     • At least 21 of these hours must be taken at the 5000-level (not including COSC 5050).
     • At least 4 of these hours must be completed as COSC 5000 graduate seminars.
     • At least 12 of these hours must be dissertation research.
  3. A program of innovative and original research will be undertaken by the candidate. At the end of this program, the candidate will document this research in a dissertation. The dissertation will present the details and results of the candidate's research in addition to providing a critical comparison with related published works.
  4. Examinations. Each successful doctoral student must pass three examinations:
     1. The qualifying examination (also known as the department Graduate Exam). This exam will test the knowledge and reasoning skills of the candidate based on the upper-division preparatory courses as well as on graduate courses in the core areas. Ph.D. students will be required to answer questions from the undergraduate core courses but will be given greater flexibility to select questions from the graduate courses.
     2. The preliminary examination. This exam will consist of a presentation and defense of the proposed dissertation research. This examination is intended to motivate the candidate to review relevant literature extensively prior to pursuing the original and innovative portions of the research. If the nature of the proposed research and methodology are deemed to be both appropriate and significant by the supervisory committee, then the committee will approve the research direction after having administered the exam.
     3. The final exam (dissertation defense). This exam will consist of an oral presentation by the candidate of his/her research and the results that were derived. At this examination, the candidate is expected to be able to defend the research as being original and contributory to the discipline of computer science.
  5. Tools requirement. All Ph.D. candidates must satisfy a tools requirement by satisfactorily completing COSC 5050 or by demonstrating proficiency in a language other than English in which significant computer science research is published. Languages currently acceptable include French, German, Japanese, and Russian.