There were several of us who were considered as special cases since we had completed most of the requirements before WW2. A few of us that had begun our work before the war were given permission to complete our degrees at O.S.U., but it would have to be in a different department than the one we had our Professorships in! That meant I would have to get my Ph.D. in Physics, instead of Electrical Engineering. But first I would have to pass the language exams.
I worked on German and managed to pass the exam (was it because they were phasing out the requirement and decided they didn't want to see any more of me?). I hadn't studied French before, but studied it a bit and decided to try the test when it next came up. Both tests involved translating current technical literature in my field into English (a dictionary was permitted). The French exam must have involved very familiar material because I was passed on my first try.
I had only one physics class at O.S.U., a course in theoretical mechanics. It was taught by an Australian whose speech was essentially unintelligible (particularly to me?) and his handwriting wasn't much better; we updated notes prepared by earlier classes to get what we could from it; I got an A in it, and I expect the rest of the small class did too. My engineering electromagnetic theory could just as well have been in physics, so that was no problem. The required special relativity and quantum mechanics were problems -- in my studies, I wanted to concentrate on the foundations of the theories and not on the problems of using them, which I knew I would be quizzed on.
I studied for the general exams in my spare time and managed to satisfy the examiners on the written exams on my first try. The orals were something else; as I was in Dayton, not Columbus, I had no contact with the physics examiners until the day of my exams and found that meeting them for the first time when I took the generals was a real handicap. I repeated the oral in quantum mechanics the next quarter.
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