The majority of students were more-or-less satisfied with the qualifying exam and by a ratio of about 3:1 would keep it as is rather than eliminate it.
Rationale. The student questionnaires overall did NOT reveal any great dissatisfaction with the current Qualifying Exam procedure, except a possible mismatch between material on the exam and that taught in the core courses. This motivates Proposal 1, and our earlier proposal to create guidelines for the topics appearing in the core courses and the qualifying exam. However, students agreed with the concern, expressed by several, that the current administration/grading of the exam was too opaque. On balance, there was no faculty concensus on a satisfactory means to address this concern.
Proposal 2 formalizes an ad-hoc procedure that has been followed occasionally.