Final Exam — Instructions
Overview
This is the scored final exam for the course. It is cumulative: its questions reach all eight course objectives, from the discipline's tools in Week 1 to political economy and global issues in Week 15. It is given in Week 16, the finals week, which has no new material.
The exam has 40 questions, and every question counts the same. Most of them, 32 in all, are multiple choice with one best answer. Four ask you to select every choice that fits, and four are true-or-false statements to judge. Sixteen questions are on the easier side, 22 are of medium difficulty, and 2 are harder. Every question rehearses a skill you already practiced in the weekly quizzes, the lecture tutorials, the Political Analysis Workshops, and the paired practice final.
Coverage and scope
The questions were drawn from the course's question bank, and every one of the eight objectives appears at least once. The draw does not spread evenly across the weeks, though. Here is what this form actually contains, first by the week each question's material comes from and then by objective.
| Week | Topic | Questions | Objectives assessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What is political science? Subfields, concepts, and methods | 1 | Objective 1 (1) |
| 9 | Judiciaries, courts, and judicial review | 6 | Objective 5 (5), Objective 4 (1) |
| 10 | American government and politics: the U.S. case | 7 | Objective 6 (6), Objective 5 (1) |
| 11 | Parties, elections, and voting systems | 9 | Objective 6 (7), Objective 3 (2) |
| 12 | Public opinion, political behavior, and the media | 2 | Objective 6 (2) |
| 13 | Comparative politics | 6 | Objective 7 (6), Objective 4 (2) |
| 14 | International relations | 2 | Objective 8 (1), Objective 2 (1) |
| 15 | Political economy and global issues | 7 | Objective 8 (5), Objective 3 (2) |
Two of the six Week 13 questions assess two objectives at once, comparative politics and regime types, so that row names eight objective links for six questions.
| Objective | What the questions ask you to do | Weeks that teach it | Questions on this exam |
|---|---|---|---|
| Objective 1 | Use the discipline's tools on a text or dataset, keeping empirical and normative claims apart | 1, 8 | 1 |
| Objective 2 | Explain power, authority, legitimacy, the state, sovereignty, and the social contract | 2 | 1 |
| Objective 3 | Compare the ideologies and normative theories evenhandedly, each at full strength | 3, 4 | 4 |
| Objective 4 | Compare regime types, constitutions, the rule of law, and the separation of powers | 5, 6 | 3 |
| Objective 5 | Analyze legislatures, executives, and judiciaries, including judicial review | 7, 9 | 6 |
| Objective 6 | Explain the U.S. case, parties, elections, voting systems, public opinion, and the media | 10, 11, 12 | 15 |
| Objective 7 | Apply the comparative method and read governance indices with their edition and year | 13 | 6 |
| Objective 8 | Explain the theories of international relations and global political economy | 14, 15 | 6 |
The objective column adds to 42 rather than 40 because of the two Week 13 questions that count under both Objective 7 and Objective 4.
Read the two tables together. Thirty-nine of the 40 questions come from the material of Weeks 9–15, and the other one comes from Week 1. No question is drawn from the Week 2–8 material directly. American government and political participation (Objective 6, 15 questions) is the heaviest objective by far, and Week 11's parties, elections, and voting systems carry 9 questions, the most of any week. Weeks 10 and 15 come next, with 7 questions each, so put most of your review on Weeks 9–15 and on Week 11 above all.
The early objectives still count. Nine questions assess Objective 1 through Objective 4, and eight of them sit inside a later week's material. The constitutions of Week 6 return in Week 9's courts, and the regime types of Week 5 return in Week 13's governance indices. The normative theory of Weeks 3 and 4 returns in Week 11's debate over electoral rules and in Week 15's poverty and inequality. Week 2's sovereignty returns in Week 14's international system. The Week 1 habit of naming the kind of claim, empirical or normative, runs through almost every question on the exam.
These notes map the skills the exam assesses. The questions themselves are drawn from the 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 exam 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 question before you continue.
- Order: the choices within each question are shuffled for each student.
- Materials: a few questions ask for short arithmetic with votes and seats, so scratch paper can help. Every table a question refers to is described in words. Your instructor will tell you which other materials, if any, are allowed. AI tools are not permitted.
- After you submit: your result is recorded. The keyed choices are not shown, because the questions come from a bank shared with other course assessments.
Academic integrity
This is an individual, scored assessment, and the work must be your own. That means no help from another person, no shared or posted questions, and no AI tools of any kind. The final confirms that you personally can apply the concepts, read a text or a dataset, and reason from evidence.
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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