[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.