LITR 4340 American Immigrant Literature
Final Exam 2016

Final Essay, Web Highlights,
& Complete Research Report

official date: Monday, 5 December 2016

email exams deadline: Wednesday noon, 7 December

(This webpage is the assignment for our course's final exam, to be updated until last class meeting, 28 November, when paper copies will be distributed.)

Email submission window: 29 November-7 December noon. If your exam will be late, no automatic discredit if you communicate.

Format: Email to whitec@uhcl.edu. Open-book, open-notebook: Use course web instructional pages (strongly encouraged) + outside sources (<optional).

Official Exam Date: Monday, 5 December 2016, 7-9:50pm; No regular class meeting. Classroom available for student use.

Instructor keeps office hours 4-10 on 5 December, Bayou 2529, 281 283 3380.

Relative weight of final exam: 40-50% of final grade

5-10 days after submission, each student receives individual email of final grade report including notes and grades for final exam and course.

Three parts to Final Exam:

Part 1. Essay: When modern immigrants assimilate to American culture, what kind of dominant culture do they assimilate to? . . .  (At least 7 paragraphs.)

Part 2. Web Highlights Write an essay reviewing a total of three Model Assignments from previous semesters, including at least one Essay and one Final Research Report from 2013 final exams.(5+ paragraphs)

Part 3. Complete Research Report with bibliography or works cited (8-10 paragraphs.)

Part 1. Essay: When modern immigrants assimilate to American culture, what kind of dominant culture do they assimilate to? How were this culture's values formed by distinct waves or groups of British immigrants? What is the dominant culture's attitude toward assimilation, and how did it create minorities (African Americans, American Indians, ± Mexican Americans)? How does the dominant culture relate to later immigrants, including New World Immigrants and "Model Minority" immigrants?

Model Essays from 2013 final exams

Special requirements / options:

Length: at least 7 paragraphs (depending on style, length, etc.)

Required: Give your essay a title.

Required: references to Course Objectives and key terms explained and applied to text-examples.

Optional: personal references—not required, but you may refer to your own backgrounds, previous knowledge, & interpretations of materials. Relate all such references to the assignment or objectives.

More on question + other possible prompts: Do not regard these prompts as a checklist—not enough time!

Use our course's terms, objectives, texts, and historical backgrounds to prioritize what you learned that matters most to you, your career, and your experience with our course.

In what ways is the USA's dominant culture an immigrant culture, and in what ways does it differ from later immigrant cultures?

Identify styles and values of the USA's dominant culture: plain style, impersonality, English language, literacy, Protestantism, self-government, individualism / nuclear family, freemarket capitalism, modernity over tradition.

Why is the USA's dominant culture hard to isolate, identify, and study as part of America's multicultural landscape? What features or qualities of the dominant culture make it resistant or unattractive to analysis? What advantages may knowledge of this subject bring? Can rewards of studying dominant culture overcome students' instinctive rejection of this subject?

What images or associations with the dominant culture did you previously have in mind, and how has our course developed or challenged those impressions? What identifying markers, institutions, or styles? (Refer to examples in texts and popular culture.)

What balances do the nation and its educators strike between assimilation to the dominant culture or maintenance of multiculturalism? 

Are American systems and values universal, or are they limited by race or ethnic descent? Do earlier immigrant cultures trust later immigrants with their institutions?

Required textual references: For discussion of Dominant Culture, refer to Of Plymouth Plantation at least twice*, Hillbilly Elegy at least once; at least one text from the USA's founding generation (Crevecoeur, Declaration, or Constitution). For each of the other immigrant / minority groups—standard immigrant / "Model Minority," minority, New World immigrant—refer to at least one text from anywhere this semester.  (*For the Puritan / Pilgrim founders, you may refer to Of Plymouth Plantation once and Model of Christian Charity once.)

For text choices, you're expected to refer mostly to our shared reading assignments, but you may also use one or two poems from poetry presentations for your text selections.

Poems (since second midterm): Hamod (Sam), “After the Funeral of Assam Hamady”; Enid Dame, “On the Road to Damascus, Maryland"; Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “Restroom"; for other poems scan syllabus or see listings at Midterm1 & Midterm2.

Part 2.  Web Highlights: Write an essay reviewing a total of three Model Assignments from previous semesters, including at least one Essay and one Final Research Report from 2013 final exams.(5+ paragraphs)

Requirements & guidelines: Web Highlights essay must have a title.

Write Part 2 as a complete essay, not just a list of 3 items. Unify your learning experience. Write an introduction setting up the assignment, previewing your selections, and overviewing what you learned. Compare and contrast the three submission you review in terms of your learning. Summarize what you learned and how it applies to your final exam, career, or beyond. What did you learn from reviewing model assignments that you didn't learn from in-class instruction (or extended or confirmed your learning in some way)?

  “Review”: describe what interested you, where, why you chose it, what you learned. You may criticize what you found, but not required.

To identify passages, refer to selected submissions using student names, years, paraphrases, summaries, and brief quotescopy, or paste brief selections into your web review. (Both options in models.) Either way, highlight and discuss language used in the passages as part of your commentary. Critique what you learn.

For Model Assignments of the Web Highlights assignment, see Models of successful Web Highlights from 2016 Midterm1 or Models of Successful Web Highlights from 2016 Midterm2.

Part 3. Complete Research Report with bibliography or works cited (8-10 paragraphs)

Models of 2013 final research reports

Format requirements

Title: Give your report a title

Length: approximately 8-10 paragraphs (depending on style, paragraph length, etc.)

Assignment description: Write a complete report describing your research and learning concerning your chosen subject.

  • Student is responsible for having researched at least four research sources on the subject before the exam.

  • Organize the information you found and review how you may use it, either in your college career, teaching, or personal development.

  • The emphasis is on information and learning, not opinion and analysis, though some summary and evaluation is welcome and expected. It's a report foremost.

  • You are encouraged to connect your findings to course objectives, terms, or texts.

Default organization: The path of least resistance is to describe and unify your report as a "quest" or "journey of learning."

  • What did you want to learn? Why?

  • What did you find out or learn? How?

  • Where has this knowledge taken you?

  • What would you like to learn next? (that follows from what you have learned so far)

  • How does this knowledge apply to our course or your possible development of its topics?

Works Cited / Bibliography: Include a list of your major research sources (at least four).

  • MLA style is preferred, but other standard forms are acceptable. Don't spend too much time fussing over documentation. Concentrate on explaining what you learned so that your reader wants to know it too.

  • My test for a bibliographic listing: Would I be able to find your source using the information you provided?

  • You may use previous research reports for 1 or 2 of your sources. Also term-pages may serve as research sources.

Possible sources for research:

  • interview with an expert, including former teachers (phone interviews are fine) or faculty here at UHCL

  • reference works in library or on web—the more specialized the better (e. g., use "handbooks to literature" for definitions rather than "Webster's dictionary") 

  • no need for primary research or reading. For instance, if you wanted to do your report on Anzia Yezierska, you don't need to read more of her books. You only need to read about her.

  • use submissions on our webpage—research projects or reports by past students on similar topics, or helpful term-pages or historical backgrounds.

Advice for Final Exam, based on instructor's responses to Midterms 1 & 2

For Part 1: Essay, don't ignore deep-historical backgrounds of immigration.

In Midterm2 discussions of Latinos and Afro-Caribbeans as immigrants or minorities, nearly everyone ignored the Mestizo backgrounds for Latinos and slavery as what brought Afro-Caribbeans to the New World.

For Final Exam Part 1 Essay on dominant culture, don't ignore the distinct historical backgrounds of the different English immigrant waves.

Develop text-examples and define terms for Part 1 Essay. Don't just mention texts or terms, but analyze or explain them.

Write Part 2: Web Highlights as an essay, with introduction, conclusion, and unified parts.

Use exam's questions / assignments as guides to organizing and providing essential contents.

Use course-website resources, esp. term-links—don't just rely on memory, previous knowledge, or everyday dictionaries.

Review assignments after drafting to see what you've left out.

Grading criteria:

Surface competence / readability: An occasional careless error won't kill your grade, given time pressures, but repeated or chronic errors are remarked and factored. If you have trouble with spelling, word endings, punctuation, etc., get help from a mentor or tutor (ask them to explain help).

Content: Use, explain, and apply course terms as defined primarily by course term-links; refer frequently to objectives and texts.

Thematic organization: emphasize central themes of your essay. Connect parts of essay to form a unified whole. Use transitions. Organize paragraphs with topic sentences. (Helpful websites: unity, continuity, and transition; Thesis, topic sentences, transition.)

The best exams use terms, themes, and objectives recognizable from class meetings, demonstrate understanding of terms and objectives with quick working definitions and application to examples from texts, while also extending and refreshing common materials with the student's own language, examples, and analyses of shared texts.

Lesser exams talk about the texts but ignore terms and objectives. Students write what they would have said before starting the course. Instructor thinks, "You could have written this without taking the course." Don't make me write this!