Information about the Soc 1 Mid-Term Examination

Date: Tuesday February 9th

Place:

IV Theater 1

Time:9:30 10:45 am
*Your mid-term is scheduled for Tuesday February 9th at 9:30 am (our
regular class time) and will be held in our regular classroom, IV Theater.
There will be an optional mid-term exam review on Thursday February
4th during our regular class time.
*You will NEED blue books. One will be enough, bring 2 in case.
Bring a pen or 2.
*Review the cheating policy. I have a zero tolerance cheating policy. It is
detailed on your syllabus and on the website too. Cheating means bringing
into the hall answers written on your hands or put into your phone or
whatever clever methods you can think of. It is a closed book exam.
Cheating means not copying what the person next to you has written. (If
youve been doing that with the in-class exercises, you havent been caught
because theres been no enforcement, but the hall will be proctored during
the mid-term.) If youre caught cheating, you will automatically fail the class
and be reported to the Dean of Students. The Deans usual penalty is
suspension. Please be sensible. Youre better off to do less well on the exam
than be charged with academic dishonesty by the College.
*The exam is comprehensive but fair. The exam covers all the
readings, films and lectures from the first class through the unit on
War & Peace. There are no tricks. The exam is designed so that, in
principle, everyone can get an A on it (with some effort).
*The exam consists of four parts.
Part 1 is short answer questions. These questions are based on the
weekly reading questions and the in-class exercises on the films, with some
additional ones reflecting lecture material. Thus, the majority of the
questions you have already answered once if youve been keeping up with
these and attending your section. You will have some choice of which
questions to answer and can therefore select (up to a point) the questions
whose answers you know best. You will write 1-3 concise and accurate
sentences. This is the longest section of the exam.
For example, short answer questions would be like these:
What is Millss definition of freedom?
What is the sociological imagination?
What is the Lilliput strategy?

The best way to study for this part of the exam is to go over the reading and
film exercise questions and go back and review where you feel less certain
or unclear. Highlight the most important points from the lectures. If you go
over things early, you can then also ask specific questions at the review and
in your section.
Part 2 are identifications. You will be asked to identify by title and/or
author a passage from the readings or an obvious line from one of the films.
You will have a choice which passages to identify. You need to know the
author and title of the books and articles, but you are only expected to know
the title of a film. The passages or lines (from the film) selected are not
obscure and clearly reflect the main theme, topic, and points that were
emphasized in class.
Heres an example: Nowadays men often feel that their private lives
are a series of traps.
EVERYBODY should know who said this and in what book. I think Ive
repeated it at least 3 or 4 times in class!
This section is not as hard as it seems. We are not reading that many items
or authors. Be able to identify them. The point of this section is that it is a
basic academic and professional skill to be able to associate an idea with its
author. You will find this helpful as you continue through school. And I
believe you will find this helpful in your work life.
For example, lets say youve been hired by Warner Brothers to work in their
vast marketing division. You have many people with authority over you and
also many people working laterally trying to move up over you. You attend
the morning staff meeting and theres a discussion over what to do about the
new internal cost accounting procedures. In order to participate
professionally, you will need to know the names of the people in the room
(and some not in the room) and you will also need to know whose ideas
youre supporting or not. You cant just sayyou know that girl with the
yellow coffee mug or that guy with the great hair cut or You or He or
She. Thats unprofessional and you wont last long. Youll need to be able
to make a coherent statement associating an idea with the person who said
it, wrote it, proposed it, or disagreed with it. As in: Mary Romero had a
good idea that would help eliminate the problems weve been having with
internal price gouging. She suggested..
Part 3 contains true/false questions. You will be asked to indicate
whether a given statement is true or false. You will have a choice which
questions to answer. In my experience, a lot of people worry over the
Identifications but actually find that the True/False questions can be the
hardest part of the exam. The true/false questions test your ability to
precisely understand an argument or a claim. You need to have a high level
of accuracy. Again, there are no tricks but I do suggest that you read each
question carefully because with a true/false question small words in the
sentences matter.

Heres an example: Both the Milgram and the Stanford Prison

experiments demonstrated conclusively that obedience to authority is
absolute.
To answer this question, note the adjectives (conclusively) and the
adverbs (absolute). They give you the meaning of the sentence and the key
to whether what it says is true or false.
In these parts of the exam you have a choice to answer, for example, 8 out of
10. Answering more questions than you are asked to will not help you and
may hurt you. If you are asked to answer 8 and you answer more, only the
first 8 will be graded. So, read each section of the exam before you
start answering it. You have plenty of time to do this. (In general, I
recommend reading the whole exam before answering anything so that you
can see what you need to do overall and pace yourself. Make a first selection
of the questions you feel confident you can answer correctly. Then make a
second round, if you need to and so on. If you answer one question and then
decide you dont want it to count and want to answer another, make sure
you mark clearly to your TA not to read it. A big X usually works pretty
well. And one last piece of advice: aim for precision not length. For the
short answer questions, you want short, concise, accurate answers not
lengthy rambling ones.
Part 4 contains an essay question. In this part of the exam, you do not
have a choice. You must answer the question given to you in a blue book you
bring to the exam with you. The essay question is synthetic and asks you to
put things together on your own and think analytically. The essay question
in the mid-term requires that you have especially understood all the
materials (lecture, readings, film) for the War and Peace unit.