Simply, these faculty members consider comprehensive exam as an unnecessary process in doctoral study. Generally, the more experience the faculty has the more the faculty believes in the institution of the doctoral comprehensive examination. This result, however, should not be used only as a defense of the validity of the comprehensive exam, in that people who criticize the exam are labeled as novices in academia. On the contrary, they are the people who have experienced the exam most recently and are more likely to remember the weaknesses of the exam, if any. Therefore critical opinions about the exam should be respected and take into account in the process of improving the exams.
Few people come from the profession and education field in the study.
This unbalanced composition of the sample may indicate the weakness of the study. The proportion of the sample partially reflects the whole faculty population. Science accounts for 25.9 percent of the faculty responding to this survey. This weakness of the study may be improved in the future study by using a stratified sampling method, in that the same number of faculty members are selected in each discipline to get a similar number of faculty members in all disciplines. The sample is only composed of the faculty members at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.