Week 10 — Quiz (auto-graded) · Race & Ethnicity

Course: Introduction to Sociology (SOC 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Adeyemi
Objective tested: Objective 6 — race as a social construction; prejudice vs. discrimination vs. institutional racism; Du Bois; intergroup relations; reading demographic data.
Points: 10 (1 each) · Assignment group: Quizzes (10% of grade) · Due: end of Module 10.

This is the human-readable quiz with its vetted answer key and feedback. The import-ready Classic QTI is in F-quiz-week-10-qti.xml. The reusable item-bank entries and the Canvas placement block are at the bottom of this file.

Blueprint

No trick questions; distractors target the Week 10 misconceptions named in the lecture outline. Charged content is handled factually; documented facts are reported plainly and not "both-sidesed."

Questions, key, and feedback

Q1 (MC). From a sociological standpoint, race is best understood as —
- A. a fixed biological category determined by a person's genes
- B. a socially constructed category based on physical traits a society treats as meaningful, which has changed over time ✅
- C. exactly the same thing as ethnicity
- D. a measure of a person's nationality or country of birth
Feedback: Race is a social construction — the categories are made by societies, have changed across time and place, and there is more genetic variation within so-called racial groups than between them (AAA 1998 Statement on Race). The Census itself states its categories reflect a social, not biological, definition. (C confuses race with ethnicity; D confuses it with nationality.)

Q2 (MC). A hiring manager privately believes a certain group is less competent but, in practice, evaluates and hires every applicant by the same standard. The manager's belief, on its own, is an example of —
- A. discrimination, because it is an unequal action
- B. institutional racism, because it is built into the organization
- C. prejudice, because it is a prejudged attitude rather than an action ✅
- D. assimilation, because the manager treats everyone the same
Feedback: Prejudice is a prejudged attitude (in the head); it becomes discrimination only when it turns into an unequal action (in the hands). Here the belief never becomes unequal treatment — this is Merton's timid bigot (prejudiced, but doesn't discriminate). (That attitude and action come apart is exactly why we keep the two concepts separate.)

Q3 (MC). A school district funds schools from local property taxes, so neighborhoods with less wealth get less-resourced schools, producing racially unequal outcomes — even though no administrator holds any racial bias. This pattern is best described as —
- A. individual prejudice
- B. institutional (systemic) racism ✅
- C. a personal trouble rather than a public issue
- D. pluralism
Feedback: Institutional (systemic) racism is bias built into the normal operation of institutions that produces unequal outcomes even when no individual is personally prejudiced. The funding rule does the work — no biased person required. (That's why "I'm not racist" doesn't settle whether an outcome is racially unequal.)

Q4 (Matching). Match each term to its correct meaning.
| Term | Correct meaning |
|---|---|
| Prejudice | A prejudged attitude (often negative) about a group, held without evidence |
| Discrimination | Unequal treatment of people because of their group membership (an action) |
| Institutional racism | Bias built into the normal operation of institutions, producing unequal outcomes even without prejudiced individuals |
| Double consciousness | Du Bois's term for seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that devalues you |
Feedback: The first three are the week's signature trio — attitude (head), action (hands), structure (rules). Double consciousness is Du Bois's lived-identity concept — included here so you don't blur the structural color line with the felt experience.

Q5 (Multiple answer — select all that apply). Which of the following are well-documented, evidence-based claims that sociologists report plainly (rather than treating as merely "one opinion")?
- A. There is more genetic variation within so-called racial groups than between them ✅
- B. The categories used to classify race have changed across time and differ across societies ✅
- C. Racial categories are precise biological kinds that map cleanly onto distinct genetic groups
- D. Measured racial gaps in income, wealth, and representation exist in the United States ✅
- E. Because race is socially constructed, racial inequality is not real and has no consequences
Feedback: A, B, and D are documented — report them plainly. C is false (race is not a clean biological kind), and E is the classic error of treating "socially constructed" as "unreal" — race is real in its consequences (the Thomas theorem). (Hold the both/and: constructed AND consequential.)

Q6 (True / False). "Ethnicity refers to a shared culture — such as language, religion, ancestry, and traditions — which is a different concept from race (a category based on perceived physical traits a society treats as meaningful)."
- True ✅
- False
Feedback: True. Ethnicity = shared culture; race = perceived physical traits a society treats as meaningful. They're distinct concepts (people are often identified or self-identify with both). "Race is about perceived bodies; ethnicity is about shared culture."

Q7 (MC). Which founder of sociology described "the problem of the twentieth century" as "the problem of the color-line" and gave the discipline the concept of "double consciousness"?
- A. Karl Marx
- B. Émile Durkheim
- C. W. E. B. Du Bois ✅
- D. Max Weber
Feedback: W. E. B. Du Bois — "the color line" (the structural racial division, from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903) and "double consciousness" (seeing yourself through a devaluing society's eyes). (Marx → class conflict; Durkheim → social facts; Weber → rationalization/verstehen.)

Q8 (True / False). "A report shows that one racial group has a lower median household income than another. By itself, this measured gap proves that something about the lower-income group is the cause of the gap."
- True
- False ✅
Feedback: False. A measured gap is a correlation/description, not a cause. The causes — discrimination, wealth differences, schooling, geography, policy — are structural and must be shown with evidence. Leaping from the gap to a trait of the group is unsupported and a route to stereotype. "The number names the gap; the evidence names the cause."

Q9 (MC). A U.S. Census table reports the population by race and ethnicity — for example, about 58% "White alone, not Hispanic or Latino" and about 19.5% "Hispanic or Latino (of any race)" (Vintage 2023 estimates). What do these figures actually measure?
- A. The results of genetic testing of the population
- B. Self-identified social categories that people chose for themselves on a survey, reflecting a social (not biological) definition of race ✅
- C. The causes of differences between racial groups
- D. A fixed, unchanging biological breakdown of humankind
Feedback: Census race/ethnicity figures measure self-identification — people choosing categories about themselves — and the Census states its categories reflect "a social definition of race … and not an attempt to define race biologically." A share describes composition; it does not identify causes (C) and is not a biological breakdown (A, D).

Q10 (MC). Sociologist Louis Wirth defined a "minority group" as a group singled out for unequal treatment that sees itself as an object of collective discrimination. A key implication of this definition is that —
- A. a minority group is always the smallest group by population
- B. being a minority group is about a lack of power and unequal treatment, so even a numerical majority (as under apartheid) can be a minority group ✅
- C. minority status depends only on a group's genetic makeup
- D. every ethnic group is automatically a minority group
Feedback: Wirth's "minority group" is about power and unequal treatment, not head-count — which is why a numerical majority (e.g., under apartheid in South Africa) can be a minority group sociologically. (A makes it about size; C makes race biological; D over-extends the term.)

Answer key (quick reference)

Quality gate (self-checked): each single-answer item has exactly one correct option; the multiple-answer item (Q5) keys the three documented claims (A, B, D) and requires the two myths (C, E) to be left unselected; the matching item (Q4) pairs four prompts to four distinct meanings. Every term/theorist is named factually — prejudice (attitude) vs. discrimination (action) vs. institutional racism (structure); Merton's typology; Du Bois's "color line" (Souls of Black Folk, 1903) and "double consciousness"; Wirth's minority-group definition. The one published statistic on the quiz — the Census Vintage 2023 shares (≈58% White alone not Hispanic; ≈19.5% Hispanic of any race) — was verified live at the U.S. Census Bureau on the build date (2026-06-29) and is used only to test what a self-identified demographic figure measures (Q9), with source and year stated. Documented facts are reported plainly and not both-sidesed (Q1, Q5); competing interpretations are not adjudicated on the quiz. The correlation-vs-causation item (Q8) is keyed False. No computation in this quiz, so no arithmetic to mis-key.

Item-bank entries (for variants + the midterm/final)

All ten items are tagged course=SOC1 · week=10 · objective=6 · topic=race-and-ethnicity and deposited in Item Bank: Week 10 — Race & Ethnicity. The final (Week 16) and the per-term variant updates draw fresh items from this bank. (Tags: q1 social-construction, q2 prejudice-vs-discrimination, q3 institutional-racism, q4 terms-match, q5 documented-facts, q6 race-vs-ethnicity, q7 du-bois, q8 correlation-causation, q9 census-self-id, q10 minority-group-wirth.)

Canvas placement block

canvas_object   = Quizzes::Quiz
title           = "Week 10 Quiz — Race & Ethnicity"
assignment_group = "Quizzes"
points_possible = 10
grading_type    = points
due_offset_days = 6        # 6 days after module start
published       = true
shuffle_answers = true
provenance      = "~ Prof. Adeyemi's edition · Fall 2026 · built with thecoursemaker.com"