Preparing for the Midterm Oral Exam F26

Overview

I have curated here a number of possible oral exam questions that would be relevant for the middle of the term in this class.

Format of the Oral Exam

The oral exams will cover readings, material covered in your assignments and any material more generally in the class.

The oral exam will take place in person in my office (A6 L01 1151) with my door open. Everyone has signed up for a time to have their exam. It will last a maximum of 20 minutes (expect a little less). You will receive a unique calendar invite with a Zoom link for your exam time. There are 10 minutes between each of the oral exams of downtime for me. Please be on time. If late, you will only have the remainder of the time left for the meeting. Please don’t wait outside my door when I am giving the exam.

The most important part of the Oral Exam is not all the knowledge you have memorized, but that it is a “student-driven” conversation. I will expect for you to keep the conversation going. I will ask follow up questions, time permitted.

Rationale behind having an Oral Exam

• to put the course skills in a larger context
• to give students an opportunity to synthesize course materials periodically
• to use terms from the course correctly in academic conversation
• to see if you are able to revise or deepen an answer when prompted to go beyond an initial answer
• to demonstrate metacognitive and reflective thinking (“I know this, but I’m not sure about…”)
• to demonstrate awareness of course interests outside of the class, in a spoken register

Midterm Oral Exam / Discussion:

Level 1 : Recall: Terms from the Class

Terms including, but not limited to, distant reading, computational thinking, static sites, distant coding, Markdown, GitHub, Github pages, Voyant Tools, wordclouds, Google ngram, data visualization, text editor, corpus, tidyverse, stopwords, R package, posit.cloud, most frequent words, most distinctive words, OpenStreetMap, kepler.gl, leaflet, geocoding, unstructured data, structured data

Sample question: “Tell me in your own words about the concept of X.”

Level 2: Sample Questions about the Course Materials

Arguments such as

• Smith’s idea of practical knowledge
• Ama Bemma’s idea of Distant reading
• Drucker’s idea of digital humanities
• Berry / Fagerjord’s idea of computational thinking
• Broman and Woo’s idea of Data organization in Spreadsheets

Possible questions:

• Which reading was your favorite reading?
• Which one was your least favorite?
• What’s one idea from the readings you found intriguing? Why?
• What’s one idea from the readings you disagree with? Why?
• Which reading made the greatest impression on you? Why?
• Which genre of material do you like the best (podcast, essay, digital project)?
• What new technical skills have you been exposed to?
• Which tools have been the most helpful? which is the least helpful?
• Which tools do you imagine you will use after the course?
• Which element of the tools presented in the course are challenging to understand?

NB: I will have a ‘question bank’ and so they will not be exactly the ones listed above.

LEVEL 3: Questions about Your Assignment 1

• How did you choose the texts that you worked with?
• How did your assignment change as you worked on it?
• What did you learn about the topic of your assignment that you didn’t know before?
• What would be different if you had chosen more texts or fewer?
• If you had had more time for your assignment what would you have done differently?

NB: I will have a ‘question bank’ and so they will not be exactly the ones listed above.

LEVEL 4: Questions for Reflecting on the Class more Generally

• What are you learning from this class that you have never been exposed to before?
• What are you not sure about in the class that you would like to dive deeper into?
• How do the materials of the class relate to your experiences?
• What subject of the class have you told your friends about?

In the time between the oral exams I will take notes and score the rubric. Once all are done, I will release the grades.

Good luck on your oral exam!