Below is the mid-term for my Modern Japan class. You can see the syllabus here.
I wanted to think about this a bit, because I am trying to do several things with it, and I am not sure how well it will work.
First a bit of background. I have usually liked take-home tests, since asking students to analyze history without looking at any sources is….1 less than ideal. I like tests and assignments in general because the point of a class, for me, is for students to be able to produce history on their own.
Of course nowadays some of the types of things you used to ask them don’t work any more. (Damn you AI!) (Damn you Wikipedia!) But just like the slide rule crew after the pocket calculator, we need to adjust.
In my case I also need to be more student centered, as my school is. This is actually not that difficult, since letting students choose what they want to do is not exactly new.
For this one I did an essay, analyzing a primary source, analyzing a secondary source, and the compare Chat-GPT and Wikipedia assignment I did last semester. That is too much, of course, so I am letting them pick how many sections to do, and thus how to weigh them.
My feelings about the sections are different.
-The essay is the one I find most problematic, since asking them to synthesize the readings and the stuff I have talked about it class more or less on their own is, for our students, pushing out of their limits. Still, I am something of a traditionalist, and some kids will like the challenge, and you do need to provide for them.
-They will have already turned in an assignment where they analyze an article/chapter2 In other classes I have them write a formal analysis of a primary source, but at in this one we at least discussed primary sources and how to analyze them in class. I think this helps because I already have the guidelines for this I can give them, and it encourages them to think of the things they are doing in each class as the same thing, just in different contexts. It also helps to get them to read something intensively, and ties what they are writing to a specific text, so they are not too much on their own.
-The Chat-GPT-Wikipedia assignment is basically the old ID paragraph. “Identify this thing and explain why it is important”. These used to be good for covering things that were not in the essay options you gave them, and also to focus more on events/people/concepts rather than being all Annals School all the time. These are the questions that are most broken due to AI. You can try to write essay question that are semi-AI proof, ( I tried ) and grade accordingly, but for the ID things you need a different approach. Well, I think so anyway. There are some things you can’t ask about, no matter how much you talked about them in class, since both Wikipedia and Chat-GTP are weak there.
Letting them pick how many sections they want to do is the most revolutionary part of this, at least for me. I may do a student survey after the exam to see how well this worked.
HIST 437.MidTerm Exam.f24Actually good in some ways, since it helps to have some knowledge at your fingertips ↩
If I had thought about this exam before I did the syllabus they would have done this early enough that I did not have to stay up all night grading the first one so they could get feedback on how well they did it. ↩
