Qualifying Exams

I am going through my second round of Grad School. First round was in a Big Research University (BRU), now I'm in Small Research University (SRU) but with a Big Potential Advisor (BPA). My advisor is really the only reason I decided to go through grad school all over again, although I have to say that what I was doing was not really fulfilling and I missed being in a lab, reading papers, discussing science. It's just my thing, I guess.

Anyway, next week I will be presenting my qualifying exams (as they are called here) and am studying like hell what I learned in two or three years in two weeks. Which makes me wonder whether this is the best way to evaluate whether you are worthy of continuing your PhD studies.
Over at BRU the preliminary exam was oral. You basically had to find out what classes the members of your committee taught and study those. Over here at SRU, there are eight exams for the "basic" disciplines that "every good chemical engineer" should know well.

At first I thought it was crazy to present eight exams. But in fact, now that I'm almost done studying for them, it doesn't seem that crazy. It's doable and I think reasonable. Still, it is certainly not a good measure as to whether you will be succesful in your PhD studies I don't think. For example, in my particular case, my research only tangentially touches on some of the subjects that I'm studying for in this test. This is because the type of research that is being done in chemical engineering departments has changed in a big way. No longer are distillation columns and enormous equipment the focus of our discipline. Now we talk biomicronanothingees science. So should the exam be changed? I'm not sure. I still think every ChemE student should know his fluid mechanics and mass transfer operations, but the reality is that knowing that will not correlate with the research done in order to obtain the PhD for a lot of us.

It's something I think about sometimes. But what the hell ... I have eight tests next week.