Midterm Exam — Instructions

Overview

This is the scored midterm for Introduction to Political Science. It checks the first half of the course, Weeks 1 to 7, and the questions those weeks asked. What kind of claim am I looking at? Why obey anyone at all, and what turns raw power into a right to rule? What do the major ideologies value, fear, and argue, and what does a society owe its members? What makes a democracy a democracy, and can a piece of paper constrain power? How is a government formed, how does it work, and how does it fall?

The midterm has 25 questions, and every question counts the same. Most of them (20) ask you to select exactly one option. Three ask you to select every applicable option, and two ask you to judge a true-or-false statement. Any fragment or scenario a question asks you to read is quoted or described in the question itself, and no question needs a chart, a table, or a calculator.

Every question practices a skill you have already used in the weekly quizzes, lecture tutorials, and Political Analysis Workshops. Nothing on the midterm comes from outside Weeks 1 to 7.

Coverage and scope

The midterm covers Weeks 1 to 7 and the course's first five objectives. Here is what the drawn form holds, objective by objective, with the weeks its questions come from:

• The subfields, the toolkit, and the empirical/normative distinction (Objective 1, 7 questions): 4 from Week 1, 1 from Week 2, and 2 from Week 4. Expect to match a research question to the subfield that asks it, to credit each shorthand account of politics to its thinker and year, to recall a pinned fragment of the Declaration (1776) word for word, and to sort a claim by its kind rather than its topic. The Week 2 question sorts a social-contract fragment by kind. The Week 4 questions take a normative argument apart into its claim, premises, and assumptions and label each premise.
• Power, authority, legitimacy, and the state (Objective 2, 6 questions): 4 from Week 2, 1 from Week 3, and 1 from Week 6. Expect to tell power, authority, and legitimacy apart in a case, to check a case against the state's four criteria, and to keep Hobbes's answer to "why obey?" apart from Locke's, including which thinker wrote which pinned fragment. The Week 3 question separates two terms about love of one's homeland, and the Week 6 question asks how authority attaches to an office under a constitution.
• The ideologies and normative theory (Objective 3, 7 questions): 4 from Week 3, 2 from Week 4, and 1 from Week 5. Expect to describe an ideology by what its adherents hold, to place a platform within the socialist family, to keep an economic commitment apart from a regime type, and to say what the left–right spectrum captures and what it flattens. The Week 4 questions turn on what justice means in this course and on what Rawls's principles hold, never on whether a theory is correct. The Week 5 question is about attribution: how the pinned record marks a famous line.
• Regime types, constitutions, and the rule of law (Objective 4, 3 questions): 2 from Week 5 and 1 from Week 7. Expect to keep the mechanism question, direct or representative, apart from the other regime questions, and to read Huntington's third wave the way the course reads it. The Week 7 question names the design that a rule about the cabinet creates.
• Legislatures and executives (Objective 5, 2 questions): both from Week 7. Expect to tell a legislature's jobs apart in a scene, and to run the removal test before you name an executive design.

By week, the 25 questions come out like this:

Objectives 1 and 3 carry the most questions, 7 each of the 25, so give the toolkit, the ideologies, and normative theory the most review time. Objective 2 comes next with 6, then Objective 4 with 3 and Objective 5 with 2. Weeks 2 and 3 are the largest single weeks, with 5 questions each. Week 6 has 1 question of its own, yet its ideas return in the Week 7 design questions, so it still deserves a pass.

The three questions that ask for every applicable statement come from Weeks 2, 3, and 4. The two true-or-false statements come from Weeks 3 and 6. By difficulty, 11 questions are easy, 8 are medium, and 6 are hard, so the largest group is easy and about a quarter are hard.

Week 8's three-layer read is not scored on its own. It still pays off, because it grows out of Week 1's empirical/normative distinction, which the midterm checks directly.

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: any fragment a question asks you to sort or read is quoted in the question. Unless your instructor announces otherwise, the midterm is closed-note.
• After you submit: Canvas shows your result. The keyed answers 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 apply the concepts, read a text, and reason from evidence.

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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