Guidelines for Essay Examinations: Students in this class will take a midterm examination and a comprehensive final. Please note that it will require an official waiver from the Associate Dean's office to reschedule your final exam. Please plan all flights home, special trips, summer jobs, and plans for graduations, weddings, inaugurations, coronations, etc. around this date. Tests may have a take-home essay component that will be distributed in class the day before the exam, and a short answer/fill in the blank portion that will be given in class on the scheduled day of the exam.
The take-home portion of the exam will be a restricted open book format. You may consult any specific article, book, or document that has been assigned for the course, as well as your notes and any material on the online discussion board for this class. You may not use any search engine, article database, or any other tool or document that has not been explicitly assigned. If you have any question about whether something may be used, if it has not been explicitly listed in the syllabus, assume that the material may not be used. You may not discuss the essay question with any other person, though you may study for the short answer portion with others in the 24 hour period before the in-class exam. My preference is that any shared or collaboratively developed study materials be shared with every other class member via the course discussion board.
You may not use materials collected or shared by other students in other years of the course. The questions and themes will be sufficiently different from other years so that use of these materials may not be helpful anyway.
Fill-in the blank questions will require knowledge of names, dates, unique characteristics, key concepts, or important publications. These will be drawn from all course resources, including online discussions, informal class discussions, lectures, and assigned readings. The majority of these items will be drawn from events, individuals, and inventions that deeply affected subsequent history or that are central to the themes of this course or the arguments made in assigned readings. I will expect you to know when all of the assigned readings were written, and to have plausible arguments about why that might have shaped the author's perspectives. You should be able to express the three or four most important theses and conclusions of any reading. You should know the dates associated with the most important events, eras or processes we have discussed. Beginning points, moments of "criticality," "crisis," "paradigm shift", or "phase transition" and an event's ending points are especially relevant.
The best exam essays will be well-organized, have clear introductory and concluding paragraphs, have extensive details, and a convincing thesis. Longer essays should strive for a precise sense of chronological development and event sequencing. They should address the essay topic with a sound balance of broad coverage and careful detail. They should have conclusions that reflect a multifaceted weighing of the interrelationships of social forces and causal factors. Finally, students should feel free to agree or disagree with the essay question, but should pick a clear (if analytically complex) perspective, and make an effort to respond respectfully and intelligently to the arguments that might be made by those arguing other viewpoints.
Some Study Suggestions: Above all, do the reading and show up for class. When reading you should take the same kind of careful written notes that you would record if the author were reading this work aloud as a class presentation. The research is clear that highlighting instead of taking notes is not an effective study strategy. Highlighters are demon-spawn that trick you into thinking you have studied when you have not actually translated the concepts into yuor own words. Note that the note-taking imperative is doubly important for online resources. Here, too, the research clearly demonstrates that notetakers understand the material better than those who do not take notes.
Who, what, when, where, why, so what?. For each topic and each assigned reading you should be able to identify who the author was (and why their background might shape their work), what the main thesis, feature, or point of the topic, reading, or evidence was, when it was written or when it took place (including major turning points or watershed moments), why it happened (including any debates or differences of interpretation about this), why historians think it matters, and what its comparative significance might be relative to other events, topics, or things we have read.
You are responsible for integrating lectures, class activities and readings together into a single seamless analysis, so it may be helpful to work topic by topic, rather than reviewing the entire textbook first and then reading through all of your notes. Begin by looking at the major topics (as listed in the syllabus and in textbook chapters) that will be included on the test. For each of these main topics you should be able to give an itemized list of major causal factors. It is sometimes useful as a memorization tool to enumerate these (i.e. the FIVE key components of the Compromise of 1850). When reading exams I look for evidence of a meticulous and organized study approach. For each event you should be able to give a a brief chronology of the most important historical turning points (usually look for at least four or five of these), and an accounting of the major individuals, organizations, or intellectual traditions most directly involved. Along with this should come some sense of the traits that distinguished this historical episode from any other moments in the past. Finally, develop a list of the most important results, implications, and reactions. Many of the main topics will be divided into subordinate topics. Apply the same rules of causes, chronology/characteristics, and consequences, to each of these. Finally, for each episode you should consider timing, location, alternative outcomes, and context. Why did this happen when and where it did, and not before or since, or someplace else? Could things have come out differently, and what were the choices available to the main players? What were the key decision-points, and what factors appear to have shaped the decisions made at that point? What else was going on at the same time, and how might these coordinate events be relevant to the current topic? You should also know the names of any relevant historians, the titles of any important books they produced, the one or two most unique aspects of their interpretations, and have an idea about how their interpretations were influenced by the climate of their times.
It goes almost without saying that systematic study in this class cannot be done well if you start a couple of days before the test. These are questions and organizing frameworks that you should work on every day between the major assignments. You should treat every reading assignment as if you were hearing it as a lecture that you needed to take notes for.
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Note: The instructor reserves the right to change any provisions, due dates, grading percentages, or any other items without prior notice. All assignments on this schedule are covered under the university's policy on plagiarism and academic integrity. See the syllabus statement for further details. This page was last updated on 4/17/2007.