ENG 202: Final Test

I organize ENG 202 around a series of core dates and date ranges — dates of composition, inscription, circulation, or publication for each of the literary texts we’ll discuss or read together; historical contextualizers for those texts — which are always visible at the top (most zoomed-out) level of the lecture slides we use all term, as well as on the back of your CQ worksheet. (It is best to study directly from the slides, because they’ll reinforce the concept that greater ramifications branch out from each date, but if it helps to have a pdf summary, click here to access one.) These are dates that you should memorize by the end of this class and carry with you into the future — indeed, many are dates that it’ll be a little embarrassing for you to not know in the future, if you’re going out into the world and calling yourself an English major or specialist, and someone asks you, “when was the English Renaissance?”  

As much as your answer ought to begin with, “well, it’s kind of complicated” — because it is — you should come out of ENG 202 with at least roughly specific starting dates in mind! Each of my lectures digs into one or more of those dates (sometimes introducing further dates, by way of explanation and analysis, which you do not have to memorize — the distinction between core dates and further dates will always be very clear).

At the end of term, usually in Finals Week, ENG 202 will convene one last time for our Final Test, which will assess your knowledge and comprehension of, and ability to think practically with, the core dates we have been discussing all term. Memorization is key here. If you are able, by the time of the Final Test, to repeat back all the core dates and date ranges in order — including the short phrases associated with each date, like “Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales composed and circulated,” and symbols appended to the dates, like “c.” — and if you can answer very simple, straightforward questions about what you’ve memorized, then you’ll secure at least a 70 on the Final Test.

I will offer partial credit for dates that you get mostly right, except for one digit. So if you say the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt occurred in 1386 or 1361 (or 2381, bless your heart), you’ll get partial credit for whatever question prompted you to write that date. (For that emendation to my grading system, you can thank the former ENG 202 who went by “Wowstrid” on Discord, for bringing it up.)

But memorization is not everything. To get higher than a 70, you’ll need to be able to understand the significance of each date and date range — and the complexity of how those dates relate to each other and to other course fundamentals. The deeper your thinking about the dates and date ranges, the better you’ll do.

There will be 50 questions on the test; of those, 35 will be straightforward and pretty simple, while the remaining 15 will be tougher.  All of the answers will be short answers, except for a few multiple-choice ones: no response you give will be longer than four words.  

The answers to the 35 straightforward questions, each worth 2 points (that is, 70 out of 100), will be plainly evident to anyone who has memorized the core dates and date ranges we review repeatedly throughout term. If I ask you “in what years, according to our class lectures, were Marie de France’s poems circulated and inscribed?” you need to answer “circa 1160 to 1199” in the blank provided.  If I ask you “what does circa mean?” or “what does inscribed mean?” you need to know, in a way that can be summarized in four words or fewer.

The remaining 15 tougher questions will bring the core dates and date ranges into contact with basic threads of course discussion that have been in play throughout term, while also requiring you to think complexly about how dating and literature work together.  Those questions will range from the difficult to the very difficult; there is no way to study for them except by being engaged across the whole semester; it will be quite tough to get a perfect score, but quite easy to do reasonably well on this.  

Some of the questions may have no simple, straightforward answer at all: in that case, choose the best answer available. There are no secrets or obscurities on this test: all the material you engage with will be material that we have brought up multiple times in ENG 202. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any tricky questions — this test is meant to assess how well you understand the significance of the main dates in relation to our class material, so be warned that some questions may seem to lead to one answer, but if you think about it more deeply, especially in relation to other main class material, you may find it points toward a better answer.