Team, Transform & Transmit unit test
A test on this unit alone, marked as a percentage and a letter grade — for the test your class is actually sitting, rather than for May. Answer everything, then submit once: seeing the answer to question 3 before attempting question 4 makes the final percentage meaningless.
Writing to the rubric
Time management across the year
Reading the exam sources under time
The most common team failure
Visuals that carry argument
Designing slides for a defense
Handoffs between speakers
The end-of-course exam: Part B
Delivery basics that are scored
Individual Research-Based Essay weighting
Defending a choice, not the conclusion
Transferring Seminar skills to Research
Short answer 1. Define or explain: The end-of-course exam: Part A
3 ptsShort answer 2. Define or explain: Answering a question you cannot answer
3 ptsShort answer 3. Define or explain: Anticipating defense questions
3 ptsShort answer 4. Define or explain: Reflection as a habit
3 ptsFree response
24 ptsThis 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 B (90 minutes, 24 points). Read the four sources, summarized below, focusing on a theme or issue that connects them and the different perspective each represents. Then write a logically organized, well-reasoned, and well-written argument presenting your own perspective on the theme or issue you identified. You must incorporate at least two of the sources, cited as Source A–D or by author, and link your claims to supporting evidence. The four sources (connected by the theme of POWER), summarized: Source A — Paul Atkins, "Why Is Talking About Power Important?", ProSocial World, May 2023: an essay defining power (quoting Miki Kashtan) as "the capacity to mobilize resources to attend to needs," and arguing that power itself is neutral — what matters is whether it is used over others or with them, and that groups function best when power differences are made discussable rather than left hidden. Source B — Nandini Maharaj, "How the Shoulder Pad Became a Symbol of Female Empowerment: A History Lesson": an article tracing how power dressing — most famously the padded-shoulder silhouette of the 1980s — served professional women as a visual claim to authority in male-dominated workplaces, and reflecting on what clothing-as-armor says about who is presumed to hold power. (The exam PDF itself could not license this text for public reproduction.) Source C — Adrienne Rich, "Power," from The Dream of a Common Language (1978): a short free-verse poem that moves from an unearthed hundred-year-old bottle of patent medicine to a meditation on Marie Curie, who (the poem observes) suffered radiation sickness from the element she had purified and denied to the end that her wounds and her power shared one source. Source D — Jeff Desjardins, "Generational Power Index," Visual Capitalist, 2021: a data visualization quantifying how much economic, political, and cultural power each generation holds, showing Baby Boomers and Gen X dominating most categories while Millennials and Gen Z hold outsized cultural influence relative to their political and economic share.
Write the Part B essay: identify a theme connecting the sources, establish your own perspective and argument, support it with at least two sources plus reasoning, and write with appropriate conventions.