Midterm Exam — Instructions
Overview
This is the scored midterm for Introduction to Philosophy. It checks the first half of the course, Weeks 1 to 7. That means what philosophy is and how Socrates examined beliefs, how arguments work and when they are valid, Plato and the questions of reality and knowledge, and the mind, the self, and free will.
The midterm has 25 questions, and every question counts the same. Most of the questions, 19 of them, ask you to select exactly one option. Three ask you to select every option that applies, and three ask you to judge a statement true or false. Every argument a question uses is printed inside the question, and an argument written for teaching is labelled illustrative. Nothing depends on a picture or a color.
No question asks what you personally believe about an open question, such as whether we have free will or whether the Forms exist. The questions check the course's distinctions, an argument's validity and form, each position's central claim, and who wrote, said, or devised what. Every one of those is a skill you have already used in the weekly quizzes, lecture tutorials, and Philosophy Workshops. Nothing on the midterm comes from outside Weeks 1 to 7.
Coverage and scope
The syllabus sets the midterm's scope as Objectives 1 to 4 as taught in Weeks 1 to 7. The form you will sit draws all 25 of its questions from the Weeks 1 to 7 question bank. Here is what the drawn form holds, objective by objective, with the weeks its questions come from and the skills those weeks taught:
- What philosophy is (Objective 1, 6 questions): 5 from Week 1 and 1 from Week 5. Review philosophy as examining fundamental questions through careful argument rather than through authority alone, and the six branches, each with the question it asks. Review Socrates, whom we know through the dialogues Plato wrote, and why a translated line is its translator's English. Review the Socratic method: ask for a definition, test it with a counterexample, revise it, and test the revision. Week 5 aimed that same counterexample test at a definition of knowledge.
- Arguments (Objective 2, 4 questions): 2 from Week 2, 1 from Week 3, and 1 from Week 7. Review premises and conclusions, standard form with an added premise marked, valid against sound, and inductive strength. Review the valid forms against the invalid ones, counterexamples to a form, and reading an argument charitably before you criticize it. Weeks 3 to 7 kept using these skills on their own cases, so an argument question can come from a later week.
- Reality and knowledge (Objective 3, 9 questions): 2 from Week 3, 3 from Week 4, and 4 from Week 5. From Week 3, review Plato's theory of Forms, appearance against reality, the cave allegory, Glaucon's story of the ring of Gyges, and the objections to the Forms. From Week 4, review rationalism against empiricism, Descartes' methodical doubt and the cogito, Locke's white paper, and the problem of induction that Hume raised. From Week 5, review justified true belief and Gettier's cases, a priori against a posteriori, and foundationalism, coherentism, and reliabilism as answers to the regress problem.
- Mind, self, and free will (Objective 4, 6 questions): 4 from Week 6 and 2 from Week 7. From Week 6, review substance dualism and its problem of interaction, the identity theory, and functionalism. Review the Turing test, Nagel's bat, Jackson's Mary, and Searle's Chinese room with the systems reply. From Week 7, review the ship of Theseus, the memory theory Locke held, the Buddhist teaching of no-self, and the three positions on free will. Review determinism against fatalism and Frankfurt's cases, too.
By week, the 25 questions come out like this:
| Week | Topic | Questions | Objectives checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What philosophy is: Socrates and the examined life | 5 | 1 |
| 2 | Arguments and thought experiments | 2 | 2 |
| 3 | Plato: reality and the Forms | 3 | 2 and 3 |
| 4 | Knowledge I: doubt, reason, and experience | 3 | 3 |
| 5 | Knowledge II: what knowledge is | 5 | 1 and 3 |
| 6 | The mind-body problem | 4 | 4 |
| 7 | Personal identity and free will | 3 | 2 and 4 |
Reality and knowledge carries the most questions, 9 of the 25, and Weeks 3, 4, and 5 supply all of them. Put the most review time there: the Forms and the cave, the cogito and its source, Locke and Hume, and the analysis of knowledge. Weeks 1 and 5 hold 5 questions each, the most of any single week. What philosophy is and mind, self, and free will come next with 6 questions each, and arguments has 4. By difficulty, 7 questions are easy, 15 are medium, and 3 are hard.
Week 8 adds no question to the midterm. Its review of the seven distinctions covers the same Weeks 1 to 7 material. Its one new topic, Pascal's wager, is taught and practiced in the Week 8 chapter, practice set, and discussion, and it returns in Week 9; no midterm question comes from it.
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 argument and passage a question needs is printed in the question. Scratch paper helps for writing an argument in standard form or for testing a form with a counterexample. The syllabus sets no rule on notes, so follow what your instructor announces before the exam opens.
- After you submit: Canvas shows your score. 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. The course syllabus closes the midterm to AI, requires it to be entirely your own work, and names using AI on the midterm as one of the three violations that matter most in this course. The midterm confirms that you personally can identify an argument's premises and conclusion, judge its validity, state each position accurately, and match a thinker, a work, a thought experiment, or a concept to its source.
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.
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