Midterm Exam — Instructions

Overview

This is the scored midterm for Introduction to Ethnic Studies. It checks the first half of the course, Weeks 1 to 7. That means what the field is, the core concepts of race, ethnicity, and discrimination, the frameworks scholars use to explain belonging, the experiences of Native nations, and African American experiences from slavery through the civil rights era.

The midterm has 25 questions, and every question counts the same. Twenty-three of them ask you to pick one option, one asks you to judge whether a statement is true or false, and one asks you to pick every option that fits. Every scenario, excerpt, or date a question uses is written out in words inside the question, so nothing depends on reading a chart, a map, or a table.

Every question practices a skill you have already used in the weekly quizzes, lecture tutorials, and Community History Workshops. You define a distinction, place a law or court decision in time, sort a short scenario by concept, or tie an archive excerpt to the law or event it belongs to. Scenarios marked illustrative were written for the course and describe no real person, place, or lender. Nothing on the midterm comes from outside Weeks 1 to 7.

Coverage and scope

The midterm covers Weeks 1 to 7, which is Objectives 1 to 5 as taught in those weeks. Here is what the drawn form holds, objective by objective, with the weeks its questions come from:

• The field and its methods (Objective 1, 5 questions): 4 from Week 1 and 1 from Week 2. Review Week 1 as a whole. Start with ethnic studies as interdisciplinary and comparative, and what it is not, and the 1968 and 1969 student strikes and the College established at San Francisco State in 1969. Then review the four core fields and the departments the strikers demanded; the four questions the field asks and its three methods; positionality; and the archive's intake rules and consent script. Week 2 kept using Week 1's tools, positionality among them, as it taught its concepts, so they carry into it.
• The core concepts (Objective 2, 6 questions): 4 from Week 2 and 2 from Week 3. Review the whole of Week 2. That means race, ethnicity, nation, and nationality; racialization and racial formation; and ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism. It also means prejudice and discrimination; the three-way sort of unequal treatment by one person, by an organization's rules, and across many institutions over time; intersectionality; and the federal categories read as the issuing body's categories. Week 3 called two of these back, ethnicity and discrimination built into rules, while it taught belonging.
• Theories of belonging (Objective 3, 3 questions): 1 each from Weeks 3, 4, and 5. Review every framework with its author and year: the melting-pot image, Gordon's two kinds of assimilation, cultural pluralism, segmented assimilation, internal colonialism, and double consciousness, with the critics of each. Review the line the field draws between immigrant peoples and peoples who were incorporated or colonized, joining the country through force, conquest, or annexation. Weeks 4 and 5 put these frameworks to work on Native history, so review how settler colonialism sits beside internal colonialism and how the immigrant model fares against nations that never immigrated.
• Indigenous nations and Native experiences (Objective 4, 4 questions): 2 from Week 4 and 2 from Week 5. Review tribal sovereignty, the government-to-government relationship, and tribal citizenship as a political status; treaties as agreements between nations; removal, allotment, and the federal boarding schools; and settler colonialism. From Week 5, review citizenship in 1924 and reorganization in 1934, termination and relocation, Red Power and Alcatraz, self-determination in 1975, repatriation under the 1990 law, survivance, and federal recognition today.
• African American experiences (Objective 5, 7 questions): 4 from Week 6 and 3 from Week 7. Review slavery from 1619, Dred Scott (1857), and what the 1863 proclamation of emancipation did and did not do. Then review the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, Plessy (1896) and Jim Crow, the ways states blocked Black voters, and the Great Migration with the archive's E2. From Week 7, review Brown (1954) and Brown II, the bus boycott in Montgomery, and the 1964 and 1965 laws. Then review redlining and the lending table, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, de jure and de facto segregation, and Black Power and Black studies.

By week, the 25 questions come out like this:

Week 2 carries the most questions, 5, so its look-alike pairs and its three-way sort by who or what does it deserve the most review time. Weeks 1 and 6 come next with 4 each, and Weeks 3, 4, 5, and 7 have 3 each. By objective, African American experiences carry the largest share, 7 questions, and the core concepts come next with 6.

By difficulty, 11 questions are easy, 13 are medium, and 1 is hard. The medium and hard ones usually ask you to apply a concept to a fresh scenario or to correct a common wrong turn, the way the misconception checks in each chapter did.

Week 8's new material on oral history and testimonio as evidence is not tested on the midterm. It is still worth reading, because it shows you how to handle the archive excerpts you met in Weeks 1 to 7.

These notes map the skills the midterm checks. The questions themselves are drawn from the course's question bank and are not listed here.

Instructions

• Attempts: one. The midterm is a single scored attempt.
• Time limit: there is no time limit. Take the time you need, as long as you submit before the exam closes.
• Window: the midterm opens in the Week 8 module and closes at the due time your instructor sets. Start early enough to finish comfortably inside that window.
• Navigation: the questions appear one at a time, and once you move on you cannot go back to an earlier question. Settle each one before you move to the next.
• Materials: every date, scenario, or excerpt a question uses is printed in the question, so you need nothing else. Unless your instructor announces otherwise, the midterm is closed-note.
• After you submit: Canvas shows your result. The keyed choices stay hidden so the midterm stays fair for every student.

Academic integrity

The midterm 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. These rules come from the course syllabus. The midterm confirms that you personally can define the course's distinctions, place a law or case in time, and sort a scenario by concept.

The honest way to prepare is open to you. The study guide, the practice exam, and the exam-prep tutorial rehearse the same skills with fresh variants, and nothing on them appears on the midterm word for word.

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com