The Mid-Term Exam

I include on this page an outline of what to expect on the mid-term exam, so that there will be no surprises come mid-term time this semester. Also, this page should give you a sense of what reading strategies are prioritized in this course, so it should be useful well before the time comes to prepare for this exam.

Purpose and Goals

Periodically throughout the semester we will step back from readings of individual works--or works grouped together for a single class discussion--to a consideration of larger patterns in the readings and how readings from different days or units relate to each other. The mid-term exam is designed to promote such consideration, both in your preparation for the exam and during the exam itself. It tests your ability to recall, recognize, contextualize, analyze, abstract from, and synthesize key moments and issues in the texts we've read thus far in the semester. It provides you with the opportunity to focus on the texts and problems that have interested you most in the semester; rather than identifying what you don't know, it is structured to give you a chance to show what you do know and have thought most carefully about.

The larger purpose of the exam is to help you become more conscious of what interpretive moves you make when you read a text, to practice and get feedback on moves that you may not normally make, and to give you an opportunity to add some interpretive skills to your critical repertoire. When you learn any activity, it helps to practice the things that you will do most often, so that they become so natural to you they become part of your "muscle memory." Think back to when you first learned to play a sport or learned to drive (particularly on a vehicle with manual transmission!)--learning to read actively and critically is exactly the same kind of process--it helps if you add some interpretive skills to your "mental muscle memory," so to speak. Sometimes, this can be as simple as becoming aware of what you already do when you read a text; other times, this can be as difficult as learning to make a lefty layup is for a righty, or learning to hit a golf ball out of a sand trap can be. Throughout this course, you should be striving to become a more self-conscious reader, to become aware of what interpretive moves you make when you read, and to push yourself to move beyond reading comprehension and appreciation, toward a "critical literacy." This exam is one of the best ways of demonstrating the importance and the difficulty of doing this--and giving you direct feedback on where you need to focus your efforts at developing your "critical reading muscle memory."

Structure

The exam will consist of three sections:

• Part I: Passage Identifications (roughly 10 minutes; worth roughly 10% of your grade): You will be asked to identify the author and title (correct spelling a necessity!) of a given short excerpt from several works that we've read to date. You will have to identify something on the order of 7 out of 10 passages, with partial credit (if you can't remember exact names, good descriptions will be rewarded) and bonus points (for additional identifications) awarded. Passages chosen for identification will be as obviously significant and distinctive as possible; there will be no "trick" passages.
• Part II: Interpretive Skills (roughly 40 minutes; worth roughly 45% of your grade): You will be asked to demonstrate your competence in the following interpretive skills: a) close reading/explication (discuss what a passage means and how it means; make explicit what's implicit/figurative in the passage); b) relating part to whole (discuss how a passage contributes to the meaning of the larger work from which it comes); and c) comparison/contrast (identify a major theme or issue or problem or idea in a given passage and compare/contrast the treatment of it in that passage and one other text from the course).
• Part III: Short Answer/Interpretive Essays (take-home activity; worth roughly 45% of your grade): You will be asked to write a) two short answer essays (in which you explain and illustrate two key concepts or distinctions out of several options); and b) one interpretive essay (in which you respond to one of several integrative questions). Your options will be posted to the web site (see the bottom of the page for the link) on Monday, September 30 at 6 pm; your three essays will be due in class the day of the exam, Friday, October 4. [Please note that as these essays are part of an exam, you are responsible for your own work--as opposed to every other kind of writing in this class, you may not consult with anyone else in your brainstorming, writing, and revision of these essays. If you have any questions, you must contact me personally, preferably over e-mail.]

By breaking up the complicated act of reading into a small set of discrete skills, Part II of the exam identifies and highlights a few of the things readers do when they try to make sense of an individual passage, the larger work, and its relation to other texts they have read. Preparing for this portion of the exam should give you the opportunity both to practice the skills being tested, and to consider how practicing them compares to what you usually do when reading.

Advice for Studying

In reviewing for this exam, you should be looking for significant connections and contrasts between the texts that we've read in the first section of the course. Another way to proceed while reviewing is to identify major issues or topics in an individual work, and, for each issue/topic, to consider one or more other works that also treat it. Another way to proceed is to try to identify "major" passages in each work and practice the interpretive skills being tested on those passages so that you learn by experience and maybe even predict what passages I'll include in the exam. The study guides prepared by each team the week before the exam and distributed early in the week of the exam should be used as diving boards to help you jump into the work of reviewing and practicing for Part II of the exam.

Your goal while reviewing should be not only to brainstorm possible avenues of comparison and contrast, but also to consider the meaning and significance of the similarities and differences among the works we've read this semester to date. This will prepare you for both Parts II and III of the exam.

Remember that when studying for any exam, you should figure out precisely what skills are being tested and practice those specific skills. You should also make sure you understand what is required of you in each part of the exam and what criteria you'll be judged on well before taking the test, so that you don't have to waste time during the exam figuring out what you're supposed to be doing.

• Part I: When preparing for this part of the exam, don't feel that you have to memorize every word of every story. Instead, focus on 1) memorizing the correct spelling of all the authors' names and the correct spelling of the titles of their works (points will be taken off for misspellings); 2) memorizing names and places that would help you identify a given work; 3) recognizing the "style" or "signature" of a given author (what a typical sentence looks like); 4) identifying "major" passages in each of the works (i.e., predicting what passages I'll ask you to identify!), 5) identifying works that would be easy to confuse and coming up with strategies for telling them apart. Even if you don't recall exactly who wrote a given passage, that is, you can still narrow down the possibilities and make an educated guess based on your recognition of identifying features of the prose. Since you only have to identify 7 out of 10 passages but get extra credit for each correct answer beyond the 7 required, the first part of the exam is the place to rack up some bonus points.
• Part II: When preparing for this part of the exam, it's best to actually practice writing the mini-essays that you'll have to write during the exam. Take a given passage from a work you know well and do a "close reading" of it; then, write on how it contributes to the meaning of the larger work; finally, take an issue or problem or theme or conflict or process or idea or situation prevalent in the specific passage and compare/contrast how a different work deals with or uses that same feature. Then do it for a different passage in the same work. Then for passages from works you know less well. You have to be able to write a good mini-essay on each of these skills in about 10-14 minutes during the exam, so practice before-hand is key. Here's more on what doing each of these skills well entails:
  • Close Reading: Coming out of this course, you should be able to take any chunk of text and do a "close reading" of it. The goal of such a reading is to make as explicit as possible what is implicit in the language of the passage. In particular, you should be looking for all the kinds of indirect, oblique, and figurative uses of language at play in the passage--similes, metaphors, symbols, irony, hyperbole, and so on--and for nuances of tone, allusion, and connotation. Another way of thinking about this kind of reading is to identify not just what the passage means, but how it means--what work do the literary techniques and narrative strategies accomplish? what kind of experience does the reader have in making sense of the passage? Your task in this part of the exam is to explain (or "explicate") as fully as you can what is happening in the passage in question, both in terms of plot/character and more subtle textual features. The emphasis in this short essay should be on the passage itself; you may find you need to mention other parts of the work or draw on your understanding of the work as a whole in order to explain something, but this should be done sparingly and always in service of explicating what is happening in the passage.
  • Part/Whole: Doing this mini-essay well requires you to be highly confident that you recall from where in a work a given passage has been excerpted, because your job here is to relate what happens in the passage to the work as a whole. You can think about this in several ways: 1) what is the "context" of this passage? (what do we need to know to make sense of the passage? does it refer back to an earlier passage or anticipate a later passage? what readerly expectations does it set up or frustrate?); 2) what is the "function" of this passage? what work does this passage do? (does it introduce a character or problem or image, reveal something about a character or relationship, resolve a conflict, raise/develop an issue, theme, or motif, or contribute to our understanding of authorial intention [among many other possibilities]?); 3) how does this passage make me understand the work differently? Your task in this part of the exam is to identify as specifically as possible what this passage contributes to your understanding of the work as a whole, how it relates to larger patterns of meaning in the work. The emphasis in this short essay should be on how the passage affects our understanding of the larger work.
  • Comparison/Contrast: This should be the easiest of the three mini-essays but in practice is often the most difficult; all you have to do is identify an issue or problem or idea that is being addressed in a given passage, think of a different work from this course that also deals with that issue or problem or idea, and discuss the similarities and the differences between the way the issue or problem or idea is dealt with in the passage and the way it is dealt with in the related text. The first step is to choose an axis of comparison by abstracting from the passage some general/conceptual/abstract topic, issue, idea, process, conflict, problem, or situation. The next step is to choose another text that also deals with that abstraction. Then write a mini-essay in which you compare and contrast the ways the two texts deal with or use that abstraction. Adequate answers will list significant similarities and differences, but the best mini-essays will identify what is distinctive about the treatment of an issue or problem in both the passage and the related text, and will discuss the significance of the similarities and differences discovered. This could be done in terms of authorial intent, effect on the reader, or generalizations about cultural or historical norms, among other things. The key is to come to some conclusion (however tentative) about what difference the differences in the treatment of a given issue make, about what's at stake in the similarities and differences in each work's way of approaching this problem/topic/issue/etc.
• Part III: For section A., you will be judged in the short answer essay by how well you are able to explain/clarify two key concepts or distinctions (from a range of options) we've been considering this semester. For section B., all the interpretive/integrative questions on this part of the exam will be relatively open-ended (with no obvious or uncontested "right" answer for them), so what will distinguish better essays from worse ones here will be the extent to which you are able to present a persuasive rationale/justification for your answer to the particular question you choose. The better you can explain why you believe what you believe and why somebody else should agree with you, the better this essay will be.

A link that includes the instructions and answer sheet for the mid-term exam, along with the Part III short answer and short essay options, will be activated by 6 pm on Monday, September 30, 2002: click here for the link.

Report on Exam Performance

A link that includes the grading criteria and patterns in performance on the mid-term exam will be posted to the course web site once students have completed their make-up exams: click here for the link.

Make-Up Exam

Any student who wishes to have the grade on a make-up exam (based on the "Literature of Migration" unit) replace the grade they earned on the mid-term exam (based on the "Literature of Reconstruction" unit) should contact me directly. A link that includes the instructions and answer sheet for the make-up exam, along with the Part III short answer and short essay options, will be activated by 6 pm on Friday, November 8, 2002: click here for the link. Part III (2 short answers and an essay) will be due in class on Friday, November 15, 2002. Part I and II will be given at 10 am on Thursday, November 14, in Fenton 240.

ENGL 206: Survey of American Literature, Fall 2002
Created: 9/19/02 6:14 pm
Last modified: 11/8/02 3:49 pm