Comprehensive entry exams are being done away with a lot of schools. At the university I went to (before I dropped from the program for financial reasons) I sim

Comprehensive entry exams are being done away with a lot of schools. At the university I went to (before I dropped from the program for financial reasons) I simply had to have gotten A's in my last 4 semesters of CS classes. The last 4 semesters are graduate courses, and undergrads simply do marginally less work. Comprehensive exams in my opinion are extremely dumb. You take some classes and to take more classes you need to take sometimes up to a year to cram 4 years of various CS trivia, most likely unrelated to your core interest, to sit a 4-5 hour long exam to prove you can regurgitate things. It really is trivia too. My advisor issued these exams and showed me one of the old ones. I am not sure how regurgitating the finer details of computer architecture will ever help me produce research in computational mathematics but apparently it was required. It's just yet another shibboleth of academia. It provides the illusion of exclusivity for a group that is so smart, they're too dumb to see comprehensives prove nothing.