Database and Information Systems Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Spring 2008 Database and Information Systems Qualifying Examination

The DAIS written qual will last for 3 hours. Each student will be required to answer five questions out of 12. If an examinee answers more than five questions, the committee will randomly select five to grade.

The distribution of the questions by areas is as follows.

Database Systems: 3 questions
Data Mining: 3 questions
Information Retrieval: 3 questions
Bioinformatics: 3 questions

For each question, there will be three subquestions. The first is intended to test the basic knowledge related to a topic, the second is intended to test current research related to the topic, and the third is intended to test the examinee's research capability.

In addition to the five questions of the examinee's choice, each examinee must also answer one required question. The required question will test the examinee's understanding of the basic concepts from the four subareas of the exam, and the examinee must answer 9 out of the 12 subparts of this question.

In addition to the DAIS written qual, each examinee will have a 15-minute one-on-one meeting with three faculty members. Each of these meetings will be a conversation on a simple technical topic to assess the student's ability to understand and speak English at a high level of proficiency.

DAIS - Database and Information Systems Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 201 N. Goodwin Ave., Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Fax: 217-265-6494, Phone: 217-244-6241.