John Stenzel
English 180, Fall 2005

Journal Exercise 3--Sample Midterm Questions
Due Tuesday, Nov. 1, before midnight; e-mailed to me, jastenzel@ucdavis.edu,
    with your house name in the subject line.
You may also print it out and slide it under my office door, 379 Voorhies, but please recognize that the building closes at 5 PM. The usual warnings and imprecations apply about not bothering staff people downstairs!

As I will explain in class, this exercise requires you to play the teacher, and come up with some worthwhile midterm questions, along with thoughtful rationale for asking them. Here are some samples from a Shakespeare class I taught. We have been looking at sample identifications and paragraph-answers all quarter long. My midterms and finals are closed book, closed note, open and alert mind.

I would like for you to craft three to five sample identifications, at least two paragraph-answer responses to the identifications, and an essay question with an outline / map of a good answer. For the identifications I want you to provide an answer, as well as a short paragraph explaining why you think students in this English 180 should know this character or fact, and also what significance this has for what we have been studying. In other words for each identification you supply the question and a rationale; for at least two of them, you also supply a good sample answer.

For the essay question, take the time to think about a prompt that would allow you to write a well-constructed essay that would tie together ideas and insights from, say, five of the works we have read. In addition to the kinds of questions I gave my Shakespeare class, I often try to provide a provocative quotation and have students attack or support it using specific examples and analysis. I will not be expecting perfect command of ALL the reading, but a substantial portion of it. For full credit you may not simply offer a question alone; take some time to explain where a good answer would go, how you would craft it, and why it would be significant to the work we are doing this quarter. I have found that students who pre-visualize pressure-writing tasks in this way do better on my exams than those who come in without having done so; they also have fewer colds and are more likely to win the lottery.

We will be going over some of these in class on the Wednesday before the exam; the better job you do on these, the better off we all will be. I look forward to seeing what you come up with!