Jin Hyun Park / Qual Exam Prep
Practice tests and study notes for the qualifier exam in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University.
The Ph.D. qualifier exam in the CSE department at Texas A&M is the ETS Major Field Test (MFT) in Computer Science. It is a multiple-choice test that covers the core of an undergraduate CS curriculum: algorithms and data structures, computer architecture, operating systems, networking, databases, theory of computation, and a little bit of AI. ETS publishes a test description (PDF).
Start with the practice tests, not with textbooks. The exam does not try to cover everything you learned as an undergraduate. Instead, it draws from a pool of questions that repeats from one sitting to the next. New questions are added each time, but a good share of them are the same as or very close to questions from earlier exams.
I know this because I took the exam twice. The first time I reviewed all of the undergraduate material and did not pass. The second time I ignored the textbooks, worked through every past and sample question I could find, and made sure I understood why each answer was right. That was enough to pass.
So my advice is simple: solve as many practice questions as you can, and for each one, understand the idea behind the answer rather than memorizing it. The topic pages below are the notes I wrote while doing exactly that. They are not complete textbooks; they are the facts and explanations that kept coming up.
These are my own study notes. Some figures are reproduced from the sources linked in their captions.