Preliminary Examinations

General Information

Ph.D. students in the Berkeley mathematics department are required to pass this examination within the first three semesters.

Exams (PDF, with solutions for recent exams - older exams available also in an HTML version)
Syllabus and policy
Exam statistics

All the examinations are written by a committee of Berkeley professors. The files up to Spring 2001 were compiled and edited by Paulo Ney de Souza and Jorge-Nuno Silva.

The Fall 2009 Preliminary Examination

The exam was held Monday, August 17, and Tuesday, August 18, 2009, from 9 am to 12 noon each day, in 60 Evans Hall.

Solutions will be posted under "Exams" above in the near future.

The Prelim results are ready:

Passing score is 79 out of 120.

The following numbers have passed:

1, 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24

The following numbers did not pass:

2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14

The exams are available for review in 910 Evans.

Contact Information

For further information contact Richard Borcherds.