Dear Susan,
Having faced the same problem myself, I took refuge in what I
felt had best prepared me to face graduate work: the British
undergraduate final (it took some years for me to admit this to myself,
but it finally came to that... ). In other words, I set a bunch of
questions that would have been at home on a run-of-the-mill finals paper
at A.N.Other University in the U.K. and let the candidate show his paces
in terms of analysis and command of the subject. You are doubtless
familiar with the kind of question: ten variants on "Palmerston was an
idiot." Discuss; How was Ramsey Macdonald able to hold the Labour
party together during its first term in office, etc, of which the
candidate answered three in three hours. It worked,
and seemed to me to be at least as fair and as academically sound as the
approach being taken by my colleagues.
Daniel Szechi
Auburn University