My area exam was approved by my committee in April 2007 after a lot of revisions. Feel free to take it as a sample, but you should realize that the exact requirements for an area exam vary greatly depending on who is on your committee. So feel free to take this as a sample, but it is best of all if you talk to your committee about their expectations.
Along the way, I also wrote a page full of tips and tricks for your area exam - but the biggest tip of all is talk to your committee early and often. I didn't, and it led to me taking a lot longer to complete it than I should have - and two more revisions than I would have liked. The full story is something like:
To: 4 professors and the grad student coordinator Subject: What is an area exam Prof XXXX wanted a pointer to the guidelines about what an area exam is supposed to be, and it turned into a discursive essay about the evolution of my own area exam. The particular requirement that's been a monkey on my back is "A survey of the area in the form of a position paper and an annotated bibliography" It turns out that many people understand many different things when they read this. I wrote a small position paper (5 pages) and had an annotated bibliography where I wrote a brief summary of a bunch of papers (about 35 papers in all, with no connective tissue. It was just a list of papers and summaries), and that was deemed to be the wrong thing, so I wrote a larger paper encompassing the two in the form of a survey paper (16 pages citing about 45 things), but that was deemed to be too short and not citing enough resources, and so today I handed you (or put in your mailbox, and also attached to this email) a completely rewritten long paper that is really long, contains a big survey, and cites a bunch of stuff (30 pages with citations totaling 135 in all - I read 400+ but I couldn't manage to work them in for reasons of topic or because they had been completely subsumed by later work) It would be great if the official guidelines could be rewritten to disambiguate what is required. Writing a survey paper has been a frustrating exercise in not doing actual research and just reading other peoples' things, but that may be just me and survey papers. However, rewriting it 3 times in 3 different forms has been *really* frustrating. Here's a link to the policy: http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/education/graduate/Doctoral_Degree.php Hopefully this paper will affirmatively deem me "ready for independent research work; if so, the student is advanced to candidacy." -Peter -- Peter Boothe http://soy.dyndns.org/~peter