UPDATE: Your final exam is now available here.
In 2021, your final examination will be take-home (you will have 24 hours to complete it), and will take a slightly different format to previous years.
The final exam will take place on Tuesday, April 20, from 12pm (Pacific Time). You will have 24 hours to complete it (you will email it to me by 12pm Pacific Time the following day), but it is designed to take you no more than two and a half hours.
Though it is an “open book” exam, and though you have 24 hours to complete it, I strongly suggest that you treat it as a “normal” exam. In other words, a) that you spend the days beforehand revising and preparing for it, b) that you assign a discrete period of time to write it (which you could break into two chunks, if you want), and c) that you use the Internet etc. minimally if at all. I feel very much that you will do better on the exam if you do this.
Remember: what I am interested in is what you think and what you have learned over the semester, rather than what you are able to look up at the last minute. It is likely that looking things up at the last minute will mean that you do worse, not better.
If you find yourself spending more than two and a half hours on this exam, then something is going wrong.
Another way of thinking about this is that our playlist lasts just over an hour and a half (96 minutes and 5 seconds, not including any adverts YouTube may add). If you start the playlist at the same time as you start the exam, then you should be well into the second part of the exam by the time it finishes… and you should be done before you have the chance to play the whole thing over again!
This is not to say that you cannot double-check details (say, the spelling of an author’s name, or specific dates) if you want to do so. In fact, you have the liberty to look up anything that you want to look up. This is part of the fact that this is an open-book exam. But again, I doubt that this will help you very much. If anything, it may be a distraction from what I am looking for, which is your analysis drawing from material that we have covered over the semester.
The exam itself will consist of two parts:
- The first part (40%) will comprise short discussions (definitions and descriptions) of key concepts. You will be given seven of these concepts, and asked to write a brief (paragraph or two) definition and description of each of them. In your account, you should both a) say something about the concept as it applies to the region in general and b) give at least one specific example from among the texts that we have studied or discussed and explain how this example illustrates the concept in question.
- The second part (60%) will comprise an essay in response to a question taken from a list of possible questions which have been provided in advance.
For reference, here is a final exam from a previous year, though note that the format and content have changed: 2017.
