Oral Qualifying Exam (OQE) – Overview

The oral qualifying exam (OQE) determines whether the student is qualified for advancement to doctoral candidacy. The OQE consists of 1) a written proposal in the style of an NIH F31 grant application and 2) an oral presentation of the proposal to the student’s doctoral committee. The written proposal describes the student’s proposed dissertation research project, including background, specific aims, preliminary findings, and an experimental plan for addressing the specific aims.

Passing the OQE is a significant academic milestone and a university requirement for PhD students. The exam generally requires about 2 hours to complete. Only the student and their doctoral committee may attend the exam.

The OQE must be completed by the fall quarter of Year 3. Exceptions will be considered. For example, appointment to a fellowship that requires advancement to candidacy.

MSTP students and STAR Fellows must complete the OQE by the spring quarter of Year 2.

Mentor involvement with the OQE
During Year 2, students and mentors will interact significantly to define a series of questions and goals, which will be further refined through generation of data by the student. By the end of Year 2, the student should have conceptualized a series of aims – in full agreement with their mentor – that will serve as the basis for the OQE proposal. Preliminary results supporting the proposed research are beneficial but not required for the OQE.

The student must write the entire proposal by themselves. Mentors may offer comments to help the student think about their experiments (e.g., adequate controls, quantification, etc.) and to ensure that the student understands what it is to propose an experiment that is complete and definitive. The mentor may not edit the proposal, but should be involved to teach/enhance scientific rigor and provide feedback for improvements. Comments such as: “this is unclear”, “re- phrase”, “reconsider your thoughts”, “where are the controls”, “inclusion of statistics and quantification”, etc., should be the extent of the comments provided by the mentor.

Students are encouraged to prepare for the OQE by presenting to their lab. Practice presentations allow the student to gain conviction of the chosen experimental design, be able to defend it, identify pitfalls and shortcomings, and understand the basic molecular/protein/developmental underpinnings behind their project.

For example: If the experimental design requires generation of a construct, the student needs to understand whether a signal peptide sequence will be required to ensure that the protein goes to the ER. If they are making a truncated protein that is supposed to go the nucleus, they should understand what nuclear localization signals are and how the import of proteins into the nucleus occurs.

The process of preparing for the OQE should be one that is associated with significant growth and development of scientific maturity. Students must have a strong grasp of the literature associated with their proposals and a strong understanding of experimental design, alternative approaches, and all possible outcomes of a pending experiment.

OQE Proposal Topic
The OQE proposal must outline the student’s planned dissertation project, to be completed under their mentor’s supervision. It should incorporate any preliminary data collected while working in the lab.

The student’s proposal and presentation are expected to demonstrate:

• A scholarly understanding of the background of the research proposal
• Well-designed and testable aims
• A critical understanding of the techniques employed in the proposed research
• An understanding of potential experimental outcomes and their interpretation.

Students cannot consult their doctoral committee members to formulate the proposed research topic.

The proposal must be the intellectual product of the student. The student is expected to thoroughly review the current scientific literature related to their research, suggest a well-defined experimental approach to one or more questions, and provide an interpretation of possible results. Include sufficient but concise information to facilitate understanding, but avoid redundancies. Readers often consider brevity and clarity to be indicative of a focused approach to a research objective and the ability to undertake a research project. Students must emphasize the significance of their research proposal. It is important to differentiate data generated by the student versus data generated by other lab members.

OQE Policies and Procedures

• 2 hours: ~45 minutes for the oral presentation and the remaining time for Q&A with the committee. The committee may ask questions before, during, and after the presentation.
• All committee members must attend the exam. In-person is the default mode of participation. Mentors do not attend or participate in their student’s OQE.
  • External committee members (non-UCLA) may participate remotely with approval from the committee chair or co-chairs.
  • Requests for the remote participation of the student or UCLA committee members require approval from the student’s Home Area Director or MBIDP Chair. Approval may be granted for reasons that include: health, significant difficulty scheduling an in-person examination, UCLA faculty or student located off campus, or financial hardship.
  • If any participants attend remotely, it is the student’s responsibility to have the proper audio/visual equipment so that all participants can be seen and heard. Wide-angle conference cameras can be borrowed from the MBI office. It is recommended that students test them in advance to ensure they work properly with their device.
• Students schedule their exam directly with their committee. The student must schedule a date and time (2 hours) that is agreeable to all committee members, then book a room themselves after a date/time is confirmed.
  • Recommended: use scheduling poll software such as When2meet, Doodle, or Microsoft Outlook to collect committee availability. After finalizing the exam date & time, email confirmation to all committee members on the same thread and send them a calendar invite (e.g. using Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar) so they can directly add it to their calendar.
• At least 1 month before the OQE, the student must notify the Student Affairs Officer of the exam date and time.
• At least 1 week before the OQE, the student must email the written proposal to their entire committee, and CC or BCC the Student Affairs Officer.
• Students may not provide food or refreshments of any kind at the OQE.

Room Reservation Resources

• Boyer Hall 130, 168D, or 159 (168D is ideal for OQE’s and committee meetings)
• Terasaki Life Sciences Building and Hershey Hall
• DGSOM-managed rooms
• Additional rooms may be available through the mentor’s department.

OQE Format

The proposal must follow the outline of an NIH F31 grant application:

1. Title page – 1 page max
2. Summary and Specific Aims – 1 page max
3. Research Strategy, including figures and illustrations – 6 pages max
4. Literature References – no page limit

Title page
The title page must include the following information:

• Proposal title
• The words “Oral Qualifying Examination”
• Student’s name
• Mentor’s name
• Names of committee members
• Academic term that the exam is taking place (e.g., Fall 2026)
• Building, room number, and exam start time

Summary and Specific Aims page
1 page maximum, describing the problem being addressed, the problem’s relevance, and how the problem will be addressed in the proposal. Include an overarching hypothesis and list the specific aims to address this hypothesis.

Research Strategy
6 pages maximum. Must contain:

Significance

• Explain the importance of the problem or critical barrier to progress that the proposed project addresses.
• Explain how the proposed project will improve scientific knowledge, technical capability, and/or clinical practice in one or more broad fields.
• Describe how the concepts, methods, technologies, treatments, services, or preventative interventions that drive this field will be changed if the proposed aims are achieved.

Approach

• Describe the overall strategy, methodology, and analyses to be used to accomplish the specific aims of the project.
• Discuss potential problems, alternative strategies, and benchmarks for success anticipated to achieve the aims.
• If the project is in the early stages of development, describe any strategy to establish feasibility, and address the management of any high-risk aspects of the proposed work.

Research data (text and figures)

Literature References
No page limit. Ensure that references are cited in full and formatted consistently.

Font

• Arial, Georgia, Helvetica, or Palatino Linotype typeface
• Black font color only
• Font size of 11 or larger
• Use the “insert Symbol” feature for Greek letters or special characters

Paper Size and Page Margins

• standard US letter size paper (8 ½” x 11″)
• 0.5” margins (top, bottom, left, and right) for all pages
• No information should appear in the header, footer, or margins, including page numbers

Grading
Students are expected to deliver a strong, novel proposal that is written in a scholarly and clear manner and must be able to defend the proposal orally, answer questions related to any aspect of the presented work, and discuss the literature. The proposal needs to be experimentally-compelling and integrated with the current literature.

The doctoral committee will assess the OQE on the following:

1. The student’s ability to convincingly argue in favor of their hypothesis and experimental design
   1. A good hypothesis and experimental design generates yes/no answers. If an experiment did not work as expected, the student must be prepared to interpret that result and design backup approaches. While there is little room to cover backups in the written proposal, students should be prepared to present these orally.
2. The student’s ability to respond to fact-based questions about their project’s:
   1. Background – Students must know the background literature as assessed by an expert in that area and should be prepared to cite studies.
   2. Methodology – Students must know the details behind the methodology used to address the hypothesis. The written proposal does not need to delve into a detailed description of the methodology, but students must be prepared to discuss it if questioned by the committee, e.g. if RNAi is to reduced gene expression, students must know how to deliver the RNAi and how RNAi inactivates genes, as well as alternative strategies to achieve the same goal.
   3. General knowledge – Students should be able to answer general questions about their project’s field/discipline.
3. The quality of the student’s oral presentation:
   1. The OQE presentation is expected to be well-organized, articulate, sufficiently-paced, and should use visuals appropriately. To prepare, students should practice in front of peers. When practicing, the audience should ask questions about the background, methods, experimental approach, and interpretation of possible results.

Final Assessment
At the end of the exam, the committee will confer privately and find consensus on one of the four following assessments:

• Pass – strong written proposal and strong oral presentation. The student will advance to doctoral candidacy.
• Pass and reconvene within six months – strong written proposal and strong oral presentation. The committee would like to check in on the student’s progress in 6 months rather than wait for a full year. The student will advance to doctoral candidacy.
• Conditional Pass – Strong oral presentation but written proposal needs revisions. A student who receives a “Conditional Pass” will be given 30 days from their original exam date to resubmit their written proposal to their committee. A second oral presentation is not required. The committee chair will be given 30 days to notify the student of the committee’s final decision.
• Not Pass – the oral presentation was poor, regardless of the quality of the written proposal. The student does not advance to doctoral candidacy. Students who receive a “Not Pass” on their first attempt may retake it once within six months of the original exam date. If the student does not pass the exam on the second attempt, they will be considered for academic disqualification.