MEMO From: Mark Granovetter To Students in Sociology 114 or 214, Fall, 2011 Subject: Midterm and Final Exams

Midterm Exam The midterm exam, given on October 26, will be held in our regular classroom. The format is closed-book, but you may bring one 8 x 11 sheet of notes. The sheet may be printed on both sides with any margins or fonts you like, but (to anticipate a question I have actually been asked) please no magnifying devices, or other visual aids. Please have your laptops, cell phones, etc. turned off during the exam. We ask you to write in the traditional bluebooks, making some modest attempt at legibility. The questions are somewhere between multiple-choice and essay form, in that for each question, you will be presented four or five alternatives, and asked to choose the one you think is best. But you must also write two or three paragraphs justifying why this choice is best, and why each of the others is less good. These questions will cut across readings, in an effort to get you to think how the readings relate to one another. So a question might state, for example: Adam Smith believes that efficient economic structures arise not from central planning, but from the selfish action of individuals, guided by the invisible hand of the free market. Which of the following authors we have read would be least likely to agree with this view? Then there might be a list of four or five authors. From a list of six or seven questions, you will be asked to choose and write on exactly three, and you will have the entire 75 minutes of class time for this. Of course the Stanford Honor Code applies, and is printed on all blue books. Because such questions typically do not have absolutely clearcut right answers, our main focus is on how well you justify your own answer. To give you a greater chance to explain these justifications, we devote the following class, on October 31, entirely to a discussion of the midterm. During this class, I will go through the various midterm questions and ask you to explain why you chose the answers you did. This typically is a very interesting discussion, because you are endlessly (should I say shamelessly?) creative in justifying answers that we might not have thought were correct, and for this reason, we do not grade the midterms until after this discussion. Final Exam

The final exam is cumulative: it includes all the material from the beginning to the end of the course. It is a take-home exam and we plan to send it out to you by email, on Monday December 12, around noon. We expect you to turn it in by email, with copies to mgranovetter@stanford.edu, TBA, and TBA, by noon on Wed, December 14. (The reason for the due date/time is that the regularly scheduled in class exam for this course would be December 14, from 8:30 to 11:30, and university rules forbid instructors to call take-home exams due before the end-time of the corresponding in-class exam). In the subject line of your email, please indicate the three questions you have answered. It is preferable for the exam to be an attachment, as this will preserve your formatting. Please begin each question on a new page. If you would like to get your exam back by email with comments, please say so in your email message. And if possible, please submit your exam in Microsoft Word or similar program; avoid sending pdf files which are difficult to comment on.. The format of the final exam will be essay questions that, like the midterm, cut across the reading, but unlike the midterm, there will be no multiple-choice element. . We will provide six or seven questions and expect you to answer three of these. Take-home exams are open-book, but this means that we expect more sophisticated answers than if you wrote them in class. No collaboration, including the discussion of questions and answers, is allowed on these exams. Take-home exams have the virtue of not penalizing you for in-class anxiety or for inability to collect and write your ideas rapidly, which does not seem like a good test of what you know. But collaboration makes take-home exams meaningless, and in fact, unpermitted collaboration is a typical honor-code violation and will be treated accordingly. We encourage you to read the Stanford Honor Code, which we have linked to from the coursework web site, and to familiarize yourself with the Stanford Office of Judicial Affairs, which handles violations of the code. (Prof. Granovetter was on the committee that created the current student judicial system in 1997, and can assure you that it works fairly and efficiently, but it is better to be careful enough not to find out.) Just because you have a forty-eight hour period in which to do the exam, does not mean we expect you to use the entire time. On the contrary, the goal is for you to spend more or less just the three hours you would have spent in class, but three hours of your choosing, and the length limit is just the amount that you could write by hand in a three-hour, in-class exam. You know what this is better than we do. See the memo on discussion section papers and course grading, for the details of how discussion section and the two exams are weighted in your final grade.