[abhaga]

> PhD students have to advance to candidacy, which requires completing a set amount of coursework and passing a qualifying exam

This varies from university to university. Some of them do not have the qualifier exams and you are working towards your PhD from day one. Although there is usually some amount of course work still involved as overall requirements for graduating.

[xamuel]

Everywhere I've been, "candidate" is a technical term and first-years are definitely NOT. But even if there are universities where you become a candidate upon admission, presumably you remain a candidate all the way to the end, so "...a PhD-candidate is usually a first year PhD-student..." is STILL quite wrong.

[bedris]

Fair enough. Every program I was accepted to, though, did not grant you candidacy from the start as you first had to complete your courses and pass one or more exams.

[abhaga]

I went to CMU LTI and they don't have a candidacy exam. As per this link: http://www.cs.uccs.edu/~gsc/phdProgramComparison.htm UTA and UMD don't have one. I checked Univ of Edinburgh and INRIA across the pond and they also don't seem to have one. All this is for the computer science PhD programs only. Things may be different for pure sciences.

[excuse-me]

A few British universities did have candidacy. There was a financial penalty from the research council if a certain percentage of your students didn't finish in 3 or 4 years - so the university would make everyone a candidate and only count them as a PhD student for the stats once it looked like they would do OK. Eventually this evolved to being a candidate right up to when you submitted so there was a 100% completion rate but the research councils wised up to the scam.