Admission To Candidacy: Fill & Download for Free

Absolutely. My major professor advised me, as I began a four-day qualifying exam for formal admission to candidacy for the Ph.D., that other members of my doctoral committee were concerned that I show I understood the specific questions and answered them without throwing down everything that might be tangentially related. When I stood for the oral qualifying exam, it became apparent that they had made no such request: they kept saying things like why didn’t you go into this? Why didn’t you go into that?My doctoral research was largely completed before I stood for admission to candidacy. I had been published in a major peer-reviewed journal, and had been receiving reprint requests from all over the world. My major professor said, the night before the oral exam, great going, you’ll do fine. Then, during the portion of the oral exam that dealt with the presentation of my research, he thrust up a paper that purported to discredit one methodology I had used in my research. I thought he was wanting me to demonstrate how well I could think on my feet, but to my every question about that paper, he just said he didn’t know, he hadn’t read it, but it said that methodology was invalid.I was passed subject to two qualifications. I would need to defend the methodology against that attack, and I would need to take a course to “fill in” my alleged deficiencies in a subject I hadn’t gone into because they hadn’t actually asked about it. Defense of the methodology was a piece of cake, as one of the preeminent authorities in my field confirmed it was, indeed, valid, when I contacted him.When I tried to call a meeting of my doctoral committee to present that defense, and to learn what course it was they had decided I needed to take, my major professor flat-out lied. He said I had simply, completely failed the qualifying exam.Fortunately, I had held on to the letter he had sent me that had established those two conditions (defense of methodology, and a course). When I made a copy and sent it to the chairman of one of the departments administering this interdisciplinary degree I was pursuing (Program in Cellular and Development Biology), he helped me assemble a new doctoral committee and go on to earn the Ph.D.

At my university, it's called a "non-thesis master's." For those fields that offer it (not all fields do), getting it just requires checking off a box when you complete your "admission to candidacy" exam enroute to the PhD (the point when you become ABD, "all but dissertation").

A2A. “Admission to candidacy” usually means that a student has completed all course work for a Ph.D. but has yet to complete the dissertation. Some students never get their dissertation done for a number of reasons. In such cases, a student can be awarded a master’s degree by virtue of completing all of the required course work.In some cases a student who has been admitted to candidacy will apply for, and be awarded, a master’s degree even though he or she has completed, or intends to complete, the Ph.D. Such “degree hunters” tend to be viewed derisively in academic circles.