Physics GRE Discussion Forums

How hard are they? Is it very rare for PhD students to fail them? Does their difficulty vary from institution to institution? And how do they compare to the quals in physics?

Looking at the pages for berkeley and UCSC, it seems that the preliminary exams are distinct from the quals (quals are just specific for a student's research topic)

This is going to depend completely on the school. A general answer to this question does not exist. The time to ask this question is when you have been accepted to some schools and are attending the visit days, and the people to ask are the grad students in the department. If you want to know beforehand you can try contacting grad students by email from the schools you are interested in, but don't necessarily expect an answer.

Don't put too much emphasis on the qualifier when you're looking at graduate programs (edit: your post sounded like you were looking at schools, but now I realize this is the current grad student forum so I guess I'm a wee bit confused). There are some ugly rumors about schools using them to weed out unwanted extra TA's, but I believe that such behavior is in the past or at the very least rare.

Sure, the qualifier can be a pain (I just took it and fortunately I think I passed!) but you will probably be able to cross that bridge when you come to it. You are typically given several attempts, and if you fail the first time it's a wake-up call to work harder the next time. Usually it will just takes a few good weeks of hard studying to pass the exam, and then it's done. For those among us who don't work well in testing environments, there tend to be contingency plans (oral exams or something), especially if you have found an adviser who wants you to keep working for them.

I realize this isn't an answer to your question, but as grae313 pointed out there really isn't a general one.

Ah okay I see. Thanks for the replies!