Examinations
...and projects and marks
Geography 350
Mid-term Examination
The mid-term examination will be held in-class on the date specified in the course outline. The exam will consist of about twenty or twenty-five multiple-choice questions drawn from the material we've covered up to that point in the semester. The questions will be based solely on the written lecture notes I provide to you. To prepare, read through the written notes, and review the personal notes you've taken in class.
I try to make the mid-term fair, efficient, and relatively easy. This allows you to put a good mark on the scoreboard early on, and to learn about the kinds of questions I ask. But if you do well on the mid-term, don't make the mistake of thinking that you're set, and you can just sit back and coast with no further effort. The skills tested by a multiple-choice question are rather different from those evaluated in a written project or essay question.
Written Projects
Written projects are evaluated for rigor, creativity, and originality; for more details on evaluations of research and content, organization and logic, and style and presentation, see this. You are also expected to follow the general guidelines in preparing written projects. Each of the project options includes a detailed background paper, which provides guidance and recommendations for how to approach a particular urban issue. If you can't find anything that interests you among the project options I've outlined, then you can consider striking out on your own to design your own project. For ideas, look through various parts of the textbook; glance through my research page; or read through some of my random, disorganized brainstorming ideas. I'm happy to chat about alternative project ideas if you stop by my office -- for my office hours, see the syllabus and the teaching page. But, please, no emails asking for detailed guidance or assurance that if you do a certain thing, you'll get a good grade. You can't have it both ways. If you want detailed guidelines and recommendations, then choose one of the project options for which there is a written background paper and other resources. If you want the freedom to strike out on your own, then you'll have to take responsibility for defining the question, choosing a method, and undertaking a creative and rigorous analysis.
Final Examination
Our final examination is scheduled for Friday, December 9, at 3:30 PM, in Geography Room 100.
The exam will include no more than thirty-five multiple-choice questions, and a selection of several essay questions. You will be expected to answer all of the multiple-choice questions, and to write an essay in response to one of the essay questions. The multiple-choice questions focus primarily but not exclusively on material discussed in class after the mid-term examination. The essay choices are drawn from material covered through the entire course. You should prepare for the multiple-choice section of the exam by reading through the written lecture notes carefully. Prepare for the essay question by choosing one topic and studying it in depth: go beyond the written lecture notes, consulting relevant sections of the textbook and the suggested, supplemental readings. Don't try to memorize stuff for the essay question: to write a truly excellent essay, you need to analyze, synthesize, and critically evaluate the concepts, questions, and debates we've studied. For a good essay, the specific facts you remember are much less important than how you put them all together.
The topics for the essay choices are listed below. Note that these are topics: the actual wording of each question will be different from what you see here. Also note that a few of the topics cover material addressed in more than a single lecture. When you're in the exam, resist the temptation to just spill out everything you remember about a particular topic. Spend some time reading the question carefully, and re-reading it to make sure you know what is being asked. Then spend some time thinking and preparing an outline for an essay that will directly respond to the question. Organize what you know about a particular topic into a logical, coherent essay that answers the specific question presented in the examination.
Essay Topics for the Final Examination
1. The origins of cities and theories of social change.
2. The industrial city.
3. Theories of urban systems.
4. Socialist and post-socialist urban systems.
5. Urbanization and development in the Global South.
6. The "North American City."
7. Globalization and world cities.
8. The urban real-estate growth machine, housing, and neighborhood change.
9. The "urban underclass."
10. Gentrification and homelessness.
There will be no multiple-choice questions on material presented in guest lectures or films shown in class. To be sure, if you've taken good notes during the guest lectures, then you should study this material and try to integrate it into the essay question you choose to answer. But none of the required multiple choice questions will be based on the guest lectures.
Final Grades
...will eventually be posted here. Please note that the Calendar specifies: "Faculties, departments, and schools reserve the right to scale grades in order to maintain equity among sections and conformity to university, faculty, department or school norms. Students should therefore note that an unofficial grade given by an instructor might be changed by the faculty, department, or school. Grades are not official until they appear on a student's academic record." I hope this doesn't happen, but please note that if it does, it's completely out of my hands.
Papers that have been revised and resubmitted at the final examination will be available at the Geographic Information Centre, in Room 112 of the Geography Building. Recall the marking policy specified in the course syllabus: if you waited until the end of the course to submit a project, it will be assigned a grade with no penalty. But these submissions will not received detailed comments or recommendations, and will not be returned. Recommendations and advice are reserved for those submissions received at the in-term deadlines specified in the syllabus.
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"The sun never sets on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West."
"The inhabitants of Moscow are called Mosquitoes."
"Nearly at the bottom of Lake Michigan is Chicago."
Quoted in Alexander Abingdon (1997). Herrings Go About the Sea in Shawls, And Other Classic Howlers from Classrooms and Examination Papers. New York: Viking, quotes from p. 49, 51, 28.
Overtown, Miami, November 2008 (Elvin Wyly)
Newark, New Jersey, June 2009 (Elvin Wyly)
General Grading Philosophy
Here is an anonymized worksheet of student grades for a previous offering of this course. If you look through the worksheet -- and if you use a few simple skills to organize and analyze the data -- you can learn a fair bit about my grading practices.
First, I try to be fair but rigorous. Out of a total enrollment of 66 students, 17 earned marks in the "excellent" range as defined by University policy. While I wish I could give everyone an "A," doing so would completely destroy the meaning of this mark of distinction.
Second, if hard work and the investment of time are required, they are also recognized. In much of my own research, I am known for engaging with the philosophy of knowledge labeled as positivism; in teaching, advising, and assigning marks, however, I rely heavily on key principles in the humanist philosophy of idealism. What this means is that I acknowledge that your performance is not an objectified, discrete entity of metaphysical realism, awaiting discovery and quantification by the detached, neutral scientific observer: it is, instead, the mutual constitution of subject-object relations in a setting of historical and geographical contingency, a collaboratively-produced social construction of criteria for adjudicating claims to knowledge and expertise. Yikes, that previous sentence was long and full of jargon! But the sixty words in that sentence are trying to summarize thoughts and discussions amongst scholars going back years, decades, and centuries (for summaries, see Barnes, 2009, and Sharp, 2009). Some scholars devote entire careers to understanding the differences amongst philosophies of knowledge. And, in a way, that's my point: to really appreciate these questions requires a lot of time and effort. So does teaching and learning. Since students and professors in universities these days are always busy, nobody seems to have much time to read, think, and talk. Serious conversation and contemplation, therefore, have become almost impossible in large classes. So let me try a less pretentious explanation of the second part of my grading philosophy. In the best of all possible worlds, a professor is able to assign marks of excellence for the achievement that he/she helped to make possible. Or, to re-phrase it yet another way, everyone who invested time and effort was rewarded with as much recognition as possible. Of the 66 students in that class, 17 earned marks in the "excellent" or "A" range, while 26 earned marks in the area of "good" or "B."
Third, no matter how hard I try, I can't protect you from yourself. In areas of settled, established knowledge, failing grades provide efficient screening mechanisms: let's face it, some of us just aren't cut out for certain lines of work, and if we can't do the engineering calculations right, the bridge will fall down and people will die. In the humanities and social sciences, however, failing grades measure aspects of the process as well as the student outcome. Even so, there's only so much I can do to help. Note that only one final mark was assigned in the "poor" or "D" range -- and this in the case of a student who simply refused to submit one of the two projects required. Teaching, learning, and scholarship are about enlightened, informed, conversation -- which can't happen if someone is completely silent, or walks away. Note also that more than one in ten students encountered some sort of impossible circumstance at the end of the course, and skipped the exam, refused to turn in one or more of the required projects, or both. For these cases I submitted "DNW" codes, which University regulations define as "Did Not Write," but could also be translated similar to a WTF? code. Some of the DNW codes on the faculty service center were accompanied by SD -- standing deferred -- but I do not have authority to enter this code myself. It's coded in automatically by the academic advising professionals -- so if you find yourself in an impossible circumstances at the end of the semester, you should speak to someone in your faculty's advising office.
References
Barnes, Trevor J. (2009). "Positivism." In Derek Gregory, Ron Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, Michael J. Watts, and Sarah Whatmore, eds., The Dictionary of Human Geography, Fifth Edition. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 557-559.
Sharp, Jo (2009). "Idealism." In Derek Gregory, Ron Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, Michael J. Watts, and Sarah Whatmore, eds., The Dictionary of Human Geography, Fifth Edition. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 363-364.