From experience, students sometimes have trouble ‘getting’ the quizzes. The below is about the design of the quiz questions and what we are looking for. Maybe it will help you in preparing and answering the questions, I’m not sure. But hopefully, it will help you avoid some false trails and appreciate where your instructors are coming from.
The quizzes are not meant to be about pure recall. This is partly because the quizzes are take home and thus Open Book (and keep in mind that the Final Exam is open book as well), so in principle, you can always look up the answer for purely content recall questions. But more importantly, it’s because we are more interested in testing for something else.
So what are we testing for? We are ultimately testing for your understanding of concepts and your making careful, precise applications or inferences from them. And these are usually difficult, interesting (hopefully as interesting to you as they have been for us), and intellectual-historically significant concepts in philosophy.
