FAQs On SOHA Graduate Comps

In the event that you fail the essay portion, your committee chair will give you the option to schedule your orals within five days. The orals will be your last opportunity to prove to your committee that you have mastered the material. The orals will be moderated by your committee chair and can include material that the committee thought you missed on the essays, the questions you did not answer on the essays, or other material that the committee thinks is pertinent in giving you a thorough examination. If you fail the orals, you will not be permitted to begin your field experience or thesis. You may take the written exams the next time they are scheduled.

• For more information on the evaluation methods see questions #16) What decisions can be made relative to passing or failing the exam?, and #17) What if I fail the exam?
• For more information on the difference between the multiple‐choice questions and the essay questions see question #10) What is the nature of the questions?

As already noted, a comprehensive exam of some form is required for all graduate majors. In the School of Health Administration the exam functions as one of the integrative tools to assess your competency to begin the Field Placement and earn the degree. The comprehensive exam ensures that the knowledge gained in classes is both retained and synthesized, and you can apply this material in an integrative manner.

     The University, including our two graduate majors in the School of Health Administration, is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). The Master of Healthcare Administration (MHA) has an additional accreditation.

     See http://www.sacscoc.org/ for information on the accreditation by this agency for Texas State. See https://cahme.org/ for further information on CAHME.

     As a marketing tool for health administration students, the comprehensive exam ensures a level of rigor and retention that contributes to accreditation by the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education (CAHME). The CAHME accreditation and the skills of our MHA students and alumni enable our MHA graduates to compete more successfully in the marketplace for jobs. To many employers of MHA students, graduation from an accredited program carries as much significance as participation in professional associations such as the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE), Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), or Medical Group Management Association (MGMA).

     The extra expense of obtaining the MHA accreditation from CAHME is a significant investment the School makes to ensure that your MHA degree has value in the marketplace. Accreditation by CAHME is voluntary. A large number of programs offer degrees that are an “MHA,” but are not accredited by CAHME.

The graduate committee for the comprehensive exam consists of three faculty members. Your academic advisor serves as the Chair of the committee, while the other two are faculty members chosen by the PD or Director.

You should select your graduate committee chair in the first few weeks of the semester in which you are taking the exam, although contacting faculty members for this purpose late in the prior semester is common as well. Students taking HA 5191 will receive a committee selection form in the first class meeting and will be asked to select a graduate committee chair and have the graduate committee chair sign the form indicating agreement to serve. Depending on workload, faculty have the prerogative to decline a student request to be a graduate committee chair.

It should not make a difference as to who is on your graduate committee. Faculty have provided the committee a sample or model answer for the questions they wrote. If a question is exceedingly specialized and none of the members of the committee are particularly expert in that area and did not write the question the committee will rely on the rubric. If controversy remains concerning your response the committee chair will ask the person who wrote the question to review your response. This method should obviate issues that may occur when a committee has members from different areas of expertise than your major. However, in most cases the faculty can properly evaluate responses from a wide range of subject areas. Thus, the fact you may have received instruction on a topic from one faculty should not lead you to believe that only one faculty member will know the correct answer to a technical question. The same would be true if the faculty member teaches primarily in another major.

In many cases faculty who did not teach you a particular section of a course may well have taught the course previously or have an interest or expertise in the area. Many of the faculty have taught several of the courses. All of the faculty have a solid comprehension of the field and often many years of experience in the field. Thus, advantages or disadvantages owing to the composition of your committee are going to be minor.

Once you successfully complete the objective, the grading of the essay portion commences. Your graduate committee chair reviews the answers with the committee members and arrives at a determination of a pass/fail grade on each essay. Should the committee judge that you failed the essays, the chair of your graduate committee will notify you that you have failed the essays and will give you the opportunity to schedule an oral examination.

Once you complete the residency, you will have the opportunity to provide feedback to the leadership of the program about your experiences. Part of your feedback is your self-assessment of MHA Skills. The other part is a survey on Qualtrics. The survey consists of several qualitative and quantitative questions and some open-ended questions to enable free text.

The survey will ask you to comment on strengths and weakness of the major, on the curriculum as to appropriateness of the sequencing of courses, the extent to which excessive redundancy exists, and whether there are subject areas you think were not covered adequately, or at all.

All students seeking a masters degree in the School of Health Administration must take and successfully complete the comprehensive exam in order to start their field placements or theses, and ultimately, to graduate.

All graduate students seeking a degree are required to pass the comprehensive exam BEFORE entering either field experience or formally commencing the thesis. Typically the exam is taken in the last long semester of course work. All coursework except the Field Placement must be completed or concurrently being completed in the semester you take the comprehensive exam. You are responsible for knowing when to take the final exam and for notifying the Director of Graduate Programs (Dr. Kruse) of your intent to take the exam by completing this PDF form naming your graduate committee chair (the form is also available on the School website under student resources). In certain cases, you may take your comprehensive exams in the spring prior to completing coursework scheduled for the summer; however, you are still responsible for all coursework.

The questions on the written are in two forms: multiple‐choice questions and essay questions. You can expect about 240 multiple‐choice questions from the coursework in your major. The multiple‐choice questions are intended to test basic knowledge.

Unlike the multiple-choice questions, the essay questions probe more deeply for application, synthesis, problem solving skills, and creative thinking. A correct answer to a particular question will require you to draw upon materials from several different content areas. An essay question may not clearly relate to any specific course, but require you to apply knowledge to subjects in the health care field. This is the expected nature of work in the field. The job of the faculty is to prepare you to apply the skills, attitudes, and knowledge to new situations, as opposed to simply being able to tell your committee what you have learned. Nonetheless, expect questions about the concepts as well as application.

The Director of Graduate Programs is in charge of development and coordination of the comprehensive exam process. The coordinator maintains a database of questions categorized into essay questions. The multiple‐choice questions are organized and presented by Peregrine Academic Services, and they are organized by 24 competencies. Ten questions in each competency are presented during the test.

The essay questions are quite different from the multiple‐choice questions. Several weeks before each scheduled exam the Director seeks new essay questions from the faculty. When new questions come in the Director makes a judgment as to the appropriateness of the question. If it is acceptable it is added to the current essay exam.

Once a question makes it onto the exam it goes into the database in the appropriate category for use in subsequent semesters. Often the questions relate to current events and are only useful for one semester.

The multiple‐choice questions will have an unequivocally correct answer or the question is defective. If you identify a defective question, please record the question number on a piece of paper and give it to the PD to provide to Peregrine. The essay question is very different.

Essay questions usually have a relatively small range of correct responses, but there is leeway in how they are addressed. In those situations what your committee is seeking is demonstration of your ability to take a set of principles and apply it logically and consistently to a situation. This would pertain to applications of management, legal, human resources, and marketing principles, and quantitative methods, for example. Sometimes these would be cases or queries about the value of a theory or tool.

Some essay questions will have answers that vary considerably owing to differences in beliefs or values. This may be particularly true in the policy and ethics area. Your graduate committee’s expectation is that you capably defend your position while being able to explain the thinking behind alternative or opposing positions. Seeking to please the members of your graduate committee by saying what you think they want to hear is a sure sign you have not learned how to manage or lead. Nor is it often possible to say what the entire committee wants to hear, since many of faculty disagree with each other in very fundamental ways. Leadership is not always about agreeing with one another.

The objective portion is taken using our computer lab. It is all taken and graded online. You will not be allowed to see the grade on the objective until your entire exam has been graded.

For the essay you will take the exam from home and submit it through Canvas.

Traditionally HA 5191 has assisted graduate students in preparation for the comprehensive exam. You may also discuss preparation with your graduate committee chair and alumni.

At no time should you expect your graduate committee chair or any committee member to give you specifics as to the precise nature of any problems encountered during the grading of your written exams. Nor prior to the orals should you expect any faculty member, whether on the committee or not, to give you detailed answers to questions on the written exams.

It is legitimate for a faculty member, on or off your committee, to fill in gaps in your knowledge by directing you to resources to help you understand certain material. At this stage of your career as a graduate student the faculty fully expects that if you know or are told about a deficiency in your knowledge you would know how to access other resources besides faculty to get the answers. You would not call faculty when you are on the job. Problem‐solve the same way here. Primarily, the job of learning increasingly falls on you. You should be walking into the orals having prepared yourself following a self‐assessment of your performance on the written exams.

We hope that each course in the graduate curriculum has prepared you to excel in defending your positions, speaking extemporaneously, and problem solving.

• Objective question evaluations

Scoring for the objectives is “pass/fail.” A grade below 70 is a failing exam.

If you fail the objective portion but pass the essay portion, you will move on to the oral exam process.

• Essay question evaluations

Scoring for the essay is pass/fail based on an average score of your committee. A grade below 70 is a failing exam.

If you fail the subjective portion but pass the objective portion, you will move on to the oral exam process.

• Oral Exam

Scoring for the oral exam is pass/fail based on a 2/3s vote of the committee. If you pass the oral exam and either the objective or subjective portions of the exam, you will move onto your residency experience. If you do not pass the oral exam, you will not be able to move forward to the residency, and you will be scheduled for 5191 and the comp exam the following term the exam is offered (it is not offered in the summer).

If you fail, you typically repeat the exam the next time it is offered by the School.

If you have to take the exam the following semester and would have otherwise been eligible for starting a field experience the upcoming semester, you are now delayed for a semester from starting the field experience. The chair of your graduate committee must notify the Director, and the Coordinator of Graduate Field Placements of the change in plans. If you are intending to work on a thesis, you will not be permitted to register or formally work on the thesis until you pass your comprehensive exam.

Traditionally the judgment of the committee has ruled. Should you believe the committee has acted unfairly the appeal process would go to the Program Director followed by the Director of the School of Health Administration.

The typical remedies are more proactive than simply repeating the exam over and over. However, there is no limit to the number of times you can take the comprehensive exam (there is a six‐year limit to finish the degree).

You should feel free to contact individual faculty members concerning questions about their course materials or any study methods appropriate to their courses. Those faculty are likely to be more receptive if you show up with a list of the top things you think you should have learned from the course than if you simply show up asking them what to study. However, most essay questions on the comprehensive exam are not at all course specific. Faculty will not give you specifics about what to study for the exam.

The contact person for questions about the schedule of the exam and other details is Julie Carroll, the School Administrative Assistant, at 512 245‐3556 or jc05@txstate.edu. Dr. Zo can answer most questions related to these FAQs. Contact her at zhr3@txstate.edu or 512‐245‐3497.

Having a different instructor from the one who wrote the questions will not constitute a problem. The body of knowledge taught should be comparable across instructors. In many cases it may be unclear as to who wrote the question or what course the question comes from. We are not seeking instructor‐ specific responses but an ability to synthesize and apply. The multiple‐choice questions are intended to be so basic to the subject area that any instructor should cover those materials.

The comprehensive exam is a Graduate College requirement and is stated as such in the Graduate Catalog.