Good luck with Aristotle...
I'm curious as to how long your answers typically come out to be; I found myself filling up the entire answer books plus supplementary pages and  sometimes I wondered if I let myself get sidetracked. Do you draw up outlines or anything, or just go right into writing?
Do you know, by chance, when the results are typically published?

I'm excited about the chance to do a dissertation, but I am a little bummed as well that they cut some of the classes they did, "Philosophy of Science" was one I was really looking forward to....

So, what does everybody think about the new regulations? Anyone else planning to transfer to the new program?

Just trying to get the ball rolling on this topic...
Analyze and Assess JUST ONE of Plato’s proofs of the immortality of the soul.
The immortality of the soul a constant preoccupation of Plato’s Socrates, especially, naturally enough, in the dialogues dealing with the events immediately surrounding his death. The arguments can be roughly grouped into three major categories based on the main premise of the argument: that of the various actions of casual agents on the soul; arguments from recollection; and technical arguments based on the nature of the Platonic Forms and their interactions within the body and soul. This paper will focus on an argument of the first type, the “Argument from Opposites” which is presented in the middle part of the Phaedo. Under close examination, the argument holds an apparently valid form, but is based on premises which are dubious, and in some cases at odds with other Platonic theories.
The most important premise of the argument focuses on the generation of what would today be termed relative predicates, but which in Plato’s era would have been viewed as casual agents more akin to substances. Socrates, possibly inspired by Anaximander or Heraclitus, noting that heat takes the place of cold and the moist of the dry, presents the general formula that in the case of opposites X and Y, X varies in inverse correlation with the presence of Y.
Socrates then moves from this formula to the observation that X and Y will always succeed one another, and indeed one cannot exist without the other. It makes no sense to speak of heat without cold, or moist without dry. He then applies his formula to the case of life and death, noting that they also form a relationship which can be subsumed under the same formula and concludes that life must come from death, and vice versa, in a similar pattern of the alternation of opposites that holds elsewhere in nature.
The argument thus far consists simply of the premises:
1.   Opposites are generated from opposites
2.   Life is the opposite of death
       ˫ 3.   Life is generated from death
Socrates continues his argument by pointing out that if what died remained dead, then the stock of live things would be depleted over time and eventually the entire universe would become lifeless. Since obviously living things exist, death cannot be a permanent state. Therefore the following premises are added to the argument:
4. If the dead remained dead, everything would become dead
5. Everything is not dead
˫6. Death is not a permanent state
What has been presented so far could well be an argument for reincarnation, rather than for the immortality of the soul. However, another argument in the Phaedo presented at length in the Meno, provides the necessary additional premise to establish the survival of the soul between the succession of life and death.
             *7. Learning is really a recollection of knowledge learned by the disembodied soul prior to birth
Several problems with the premises emerge under examination. Premise 2, while sound as stated in isolation, is dubious as a support for the argument from opposites because the nature of the relationship is dramatically different from the ones which Socrates uses as examples. The relationship of heat and cold, and of moist and dry are both matters of degree. It is possible, for instance, for any object or system, including the universe as a whole, to vary in temperature by degree as heat and absence of heat (cold, an agent equivalent to heat in Greek thought rather than an indicator of absence), alternate by degree. It makes no sense to speak of an individual human soul-the object for whom Plato is trying to prove immortality-as being a certain degree of dead and a certain degree of alive. Clearly what is being dealt with here is a pair of opposites which are completely different in nature from the ones admitting of the formula which Socrates attempts to apply to them.
The mechanisms which generate the alternations of other opposites can be empirically established. The application of heat causes heat to replace cold, its dissipation brings the return of cold; liquid substances and their evaporation cause the alternation of moist and dry. While the emergence of new life is apparently a concept the Greeks understood imperfectly, how it can be said to constitute a replacement of death by life rather than an emergence of living from non-living, is never actually explained.
Another problem is contained in Premise 4. Assuming that the rest of the argument is in fact accurate, it could still be postulated that the universe contained a stock of life which simply had not yet run out, in the way that the modern conception of a universe subject to entropy postulates an initial stock of heat. In order to counter this possibility, it must be postulated that the universe is eternal, thus allowing sufficient time for the life in the universe to be completely depleted regardless of how extensive it is. However, Plato several times elsewhere in his work makes a case for a universe with a finite age, including the creator god in the Timereaus and the argument for immortality which postulates a living agent as the initiator of movement in the universe in the Phaedrus.

Well, I just got back from sitting epistemology, so I guess time will tell how I did, although it felt pretty solid.
You did sort of address one thing I was wondering about-what sort of citation is needed in these exams. Since we are writing from memory, are we required to fully cite sources, including the year of publication, as you do in your practice essays? That seems like a lot to remember! My brother teaches pol. science at Harvard and assured me he would only expect his students to name an author, but warned me that expectations might be different in other disciplines...
I think you are right about the skeptic's argument not being symmetric, we may not be able to tell when we are dreaming that we are doing so, but when awake we can determine that we are not. The skeptical argument is so far fetched that we can put it on the shelf of logical possibilities next to the brain in a vat scenario...