In each term of Freshman Studies, you will be expected to take a mid-term exam, which will be given in class, and a final exam, which, like practically all finals at Lawrence, takes place in a three-hour slot during exam week.
Because exams at Lawrence are governed by the Honor Code, they are not proctored. Your instructor may choose to leave the room while you are working. Therefore, it is a good idea to read through the entire exam immediately so that your instructor will be available to answer any questions you may have. Also, before you take your exams, make sure you are familiar with the procedures of the Honor System and ask your instructors about their own individual policies concerning matters such as leaving the exam room for breaks or the use of dictionaries.
Midterms and finals in Freshman Studies differ mostly in length and the amount of material covered. Both exams generally include some sort of identification question, requiring you to name the source and to comment on the significance of a few particular items from the works; and essay questions, requiring you to write at some length about the more general ideas and themes you have derived from the readings, discussions, and lectures. The identification section of the exam usually makes up about one-third of the whole.
Exams in Freshman Studies are devised by a committee of faculty who are currently teaching in the program and then submitted to the entire teaching staff for approval. Individual instructors may choose to use the exam as approved, or to use some part of the exam (supplementing it with additional questions), or to write an exam for their own individual sections.
In any case, your instructors will evaluate your exams according to the same general principles used in evaluating your papers, grading you for your knowledge of the works, the quality and organization of your ideas, and the clarity and precision of your prose.
Of course, you are not expected to do in an hour what you can do in a week, and some allowance will be made for the time constraints. In grading your exams, your instructors may be a bit more concerned about content, a bit less concerned about grammatical accuracy than in grading your papers. However, it is worth noting again that your knowledge of the works, the quality of your ideas, and the precision of your prose are not separable categories, deserving separate grades. You cannot demonstrate your knowledge of a work if your prose is unclear or vague, nor can the quality of your ideas be judged apart from their expression. As always, writing counts.
One last point: keep in mind, as you write your responses to essay questions, that a short, clear, well-organized essay, pointed directly at the question and illustrated with a few well-chosen examples, is preferable to a long, rambling response, jammed full of every last detail you have managed to recall.
