On April 10, 2024, OSU grads in the math department received an email from department leadership announcing a substantive update to the PhD qualifying requirement. The new qualifying requirement allows grads to satisfy the requirement though multiple avenues, rather than the only way being to satisfy needing to pass a set of timed, written exams.

This change comes after more than four years of grads’ efforts and organizing around the issue of the qualifying exams being both inequitable and ineffectual. The math qualifying exams (quals) are a set of two exams administered twice per year: Once at the beginning of Fall term, and once during Spring term. Grads in the PhD program had three chances to pass these exams or be removed from the program.

Back in Spring 2020, the scheduled quals were rightly canceled due to the COVID pandemic, giving the math department the entire summer to find a way to safely and fairly administer the exams in the Fall. With very short notice, the department informed grads how a “remote option” for the quals would be allowed, but grads were told explicitly that this was not a “preferred” option and that the department would rather that grads travel to campus and take the exam as a group in person.

In response, a group of grads wrote a letter to the department expressing how the department’s plan was not safe, equatable, and not respecting of grads’ privacy. This first letter was the beginning of four years of work, including group meetings with department leadership, background organizing, and two more large-scale letters to the department, for which grads were able to obtain hundreds of signatures from grads and faculty across campus.

Moving forward from Fall 2020, efforts quickly expanded to include organizing around more issues than just those exacerbated by COVID. For years, grads had gathered anecdotal evidence that the quals were fundamentally inequitable and ineffectual; grads from many cohorts noticed that white men were passing the exams at higher rates than their non-white, non-male peers. Grads turned towards trying to force the department to make substantive changes to the quals, replace them with a different qualifying requirement, or remove them entirely.

After a letter sent out to the entire department in Winter 2022, along with testimonies from math grads about their experiences with the quals, department leadership was finally forced to take grads’ concerns seriously and performed an internal investigation of the historic impact of the quals and the demographics of those who passed. This report was released a year later in Winter 2023. In short, this report provided statistical evidence that, as grads expected, white men were passing the exam at a higher rate than their peers, but that a white man who passed the quals was less likely to complete their PhD then a non-white, non-male peer who also passed the quals, i.e., that the quals were keeping those of certain demographics out of the program, while also being a bad indicator of ability to complete a PhD.

After this report came out, grads met with department leadership in a number of sessions mediated by a representative from the College of Science. Eventually, they finally resolved to take a serious look at the qualifying requirement.

After a year behind closed doors, the new qualifying requirement was finally released to grads. This new requirement keeps the written qualifying exams, but also allows for other ways to satisfy the requirement. Grads now have to collect a given number of qualifying “Points” by various means. These Points can be obtained by passing the exams, doing a capstone project in second year, or getting high grades in certain core classes.

This new system is not perfect, but most grads seem to feel that it is an improvement — that it is at least a step in the right direction. This victory is significant, but at the end of the day, the quals were just a symptom of larger underlying issues. Moving forward, grads and faculty allies will need to remain vigilant to continue to hold the math department to the standards of equity that it claims to value.