Final Exam — Instructions
Overview
This is the scored final exam for English Composition. It is cumulative: it draws on all eight course objectives, from the rhetorical situation of Week 1 to the reflective portfolio of Week 15. It is given in Week 16, the finals week, which has no new module.
The final has 40 questions, and every question counts the same. Most ask you to select exactly one option (31 questions). Six ask you to judge a true/false statement, and three ask you to select every applicable option. Half of the questions are easier ones, sixteen are of medium difficulty, and four are harder.
Every question rehearses a skill you already practiced in the weekly quizzes, tutorials, practice sets, and Writing Studios. Any passage a question asks you to judge is printed in the question itself. Nothing on the final comes from outside Weeks 1 to 15.
Coverage and scope
The final covers the whole course, but it does not spread its questions evenly. All 40 questions were drawn from the question banks of Weeks 9 to 15, the research, documentation, revision, editing, and reflection weeks. Every one of the eight objectives still appears at least once, because the first-half skills return inside that later material. Here is what this form actually contains:
| Course objective | What the questions ask you to do | Weeks that teach it | Questions on this exam |
|---|---|---|---|
| The rhetorical situation and the writing process | Read a source's purpose and audience, and place proofreading inside editing | 1, used again in 9, 13, and 14 | 4 |
| Critical reading | Summarize a whole source neutrally, in your own words and with credit | 2, used again in 6 and 10 | 1 |
| Thesis, paragraph, and essay structure | Use the reverse outline to see what each paragraph says and does | 3 and 4, used again in 13 | 1 |
| Composing in the modes | Build an argument from sources and answer the other side fairly | 5 to 7, used again in 12 | 1 |
| Finding, evaluating, and integrating sources | Judge credibility, read laterally, quote, paraphrase, summarize, synthesize, and verify | 9, 10, and 12, used again in 11 | 15 |
| MLA documentation | Write the in-text citation, build the works-cited entry, and audit a machine-made entry | 11, used again in 12 | 7 |
| Revising globally and editing locally | Re-see a draft, cut deadwood, vary sentences, and fix boundary, agreement, and apostrophe errors | 13 and 14, used again in 15 | 9 |
| Reflection and the portfolio | Test a reflection for specific evidence, and name metacognition and transfer | 15 | 2 |
So put most of your review into Weeks 9 to 14. The three objectives taught there carry 31 of the 40 questions: sources and integration (15), MLA documentation (7), and revision and editing (9). Week 15's reflection work adds 2 more.
The first-half ideas still matter, but they appear inside later scenes. A question about a source's bias turns on Week 1's question of purpose. A question about a reverse outline turns on Week 4's essay structure. A question about a counterargument with sources turns on Week 7's steel man.
Week 8's three-sentence habit (what a text says, how it persuades, and whether you agree, kept apart) is not scored on its own, but it helps on every source question. These notes map the skills the final checks. The questions themselves are drawn from the course's question bank and are not listed here.
Instructions
- Attempts: one. The final is a single scored attempt.
- Time limit: none. There is no time limit, so take the time you need while the exam is open.
- Window: the final opens in Week 16. Your instructor sets the open and close times in Canvas, and the exam locks when it closes.
- Navigation: the questions appear one at a time, and you cannot go back to an earlier question once you move on. Settle each one before you continue.
- Order: the options are shuffled for each student.
- Materials: scratch paper helps for counting clauses or sorting a citation's parts. Your instructor will tell you which other materials, if any, are allowed. AI tools are not permitted.
- After you submit: your score is recorded. The keyed responses stay hidden, because the questions come from a bank shared with other course assessments.
Academic integrity
The final is an individual, scored assessment, and it is closed to AI. Do not use a chatbot or any other AI tool, do not get help from another person, and do not share or post the questions during or after your attempt. The syllabus explains why: the final confirms that you personally can read a source critically, integrate and cite it correctly, and catch the errors that cost a reader's trust.
The honest way to prepare is the rest of the final's bundle: the study guide, the exam-prep tutorial, and the practice final. They rehearse the same skills with fresh variants, and nothing in them appears on this exam.
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