Question & Explore unit test

Lateral reading

Purpose of a source

Preliminary vs refined question

Keyword strategy

Documenting a dead end

Reading an abstract strategically

Peer review and what it does not guarantee

Scope creep in a research question

Databases vs open web

Authority is contextual

Gray literature

Recording citations as you go

This course has no free-response prompt tagged to this unit, so one from elsewhere in the course is used. It is still worth writing — the skill transfers.

END-OF-COURSE EXAM, PART A (30 minutes, 15 points). Read the passage, summarized below, then respond to prompts A1–A3. The passage is drawn from Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, "The Coddling of the American Mind," The Atlantic, September 2015. The authors argue that a movement has arisen on American college campuses to scrub words, ideas and subjects that might cause discomfort, and that this movement — however well-intentioned — is likely to harm the students it aims to protect. They begin by describing the phenomena at issue: requests for trigger warnings on course material, complaints about microaggressions, and disinvitations of controversial speakers. They distinguish this development from earlier campus speech controversies, arguing that the older disputes concerned offense to groups while the newer one concerns the emotional wellbeing of individual students, and that the goal has shifted from punishing offenders to protecting listeners. Their central claim is drawn from clinical psychology. They describe cognitive behavioral therapy as the best-supported treatment for anxiety and depression, and summarize its underlying model: distorted patterns of thought — catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, emotional reasoning, mind reading — sustain anxiety, and the treatment works by teaching patients to recognize and challenge those patterns rather than to avoid what triggers them. They then argue that campus practices teach the opposite habits: treating discomfort as danger, reasoning from feeling to fact, and avoiding rather than confronting distressing material. They apply the same logic to exposure therapy specifically. Noting that avoidance maintains anxiety while graduated exposure reduces it, they argue that trigger warnings and content avoidance may entrench the very fears they are meant to accommodate — a claim they present as an inference from established clinical findings rather than as a directly tested result. They offer supporting observations about scale, citing survey data indicating rising rates of reported anxiety and depression among college students, and they trace possible causes including changes in childhood — less unsupervised play, more adult-managed time, and heightened parental fear. The essay closes with recommendations: that universities defend academic freedom and free inquiry explicitly, that they stop supporting the cognitive distortions the authors identify, and that students be taught the intellectual habits of evaluating claims on evidence rather than on the feelings the claims produce. The authors state that they support the underlying goals of inclusion and that their disagreement concerns method.