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eli_sennesh comments on Deliberate Grad School - Less Wrong
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I've only gotten up to doing an MSc (currently volunteering for Vikash Masinghka in my Copious Free Time), but I do know a hell of a lot of academics.
From my (second-hand) knowledge, easy quals are an artifact of something very like economic privilege: your school is very prestigious and doesn't need to cull its grad-student herds as much as others, so quals are allowed to be easy. In other places, quals are used to evict many grad-students from their PhD program because resources are more scarce.
I don't know anywhere where grad-students don't start doing research as early as possible. Do some programs really involve whole years of just classes?
A lot of it is historical accidents + inertia. When I was a greenhorn at UCLA, CS quals (the WQE, aka "the wookie") were two 5 hour tests (on two consecutive days) covering all of CS (e.g. networking, databases, AI, theory, systems, everything). They were not easy at all. At some point it was realized this was stupid, and neither teaches nor prepares one for research, and washes out good people. So it was changed.
UCLA math quals are .. formidable.
That sounds a lot like Technion's course exams, which were usually designed to be two "levels" harder than the entire rest of the course, and could only really be studied for by obtaining graded copies of old exams.
In Berkeley CS there are enough course requirements that I don't think people do serious research until their second year (although I'm sure they do some preliminary reading / thinking in year one).
Absolutely. It's a function of grant money. MIT has more grant money than anyplace else on Earth, so it's easy to start grad students on research projects. At the U. of Buffalo, there were only 2 professors in my department who had grants, so getting onto someone's project was hard, and anyway you were taking 4 classes a semester and TAing at least one for the first 2 years, while studying for the qualifiers. I don't know anything about this "free time" OP talks about.
Few students did research before their third year, after passing their qualifiers at the end of the second. A prof wouldn't really be interested in a student who hadn't passed the qualifiers. That's why the average CS PhD there took 8 years of grad school.
You could do your own research, of course. I did that, but I eventually had to throw it all out, because I couldn't get anyone interested enough in it to be my advisor.