Half of your grade in Geog 101 will come from map quizzes, in-class quizzes, and assignments.
Map Quizzes – in which you will need to be able to identify independent countries, their capitals, and some important physical features – will take place in class on the days specified on the course calendar.
Pop Quizzes will usually consist of multiple choice questions dealing with required readings and important recent news events in the region scheduled for discussion in class on the day of the quiz. These quizzes will take place without notice.
Assignments are designed to help you explore and better understand the material you have read about in the text and learned about it class. They will usually be take-home and open-book format, and will be posted on Blackboard.
Why have quizzes and assignments?
Memorization and rote learning are not a central part of this course. You can always look up factual information, so committing it to memory is often a pointless exercise. It’s far more important to understand geographic principles and concepts, so that you can apply your understanding to unfamiliar situations and ideas you might encounter in the future. The purpose of the assignments is to help you learn to apply these principles and concepts.
Against this background, it might seem that the whole idea of map and in-class quizzes is inconsistent with the basic philosophy of the course, since these quizzes mainly test your knowledge of factual information such as the names and locations of countries and their capitals. The reason, however, that you need to learn this factual information is that it is part of the essential vocabulary of world regional geography. You can’t appreciate the beauty and complexity of a Shakespearian sonnet unless you have committed to memory some basic English vocabulary. In the same way, you can’t expect to understand the geographic underpinnings of the ethnic and religious conflicts in the Caucuses region unless you know where the region is, and what countries and peoples are located there. That’s what the map quizzes are for.
Similarly, you won’t be able to follow our class discussions unless you are familiar with the basic geography of the places we are talking about. Keeping up with the readings in the textbook is therefore crucially important, and pop quizzes on the readings can provide a good incentive to help you work up the enthusiasm to read.
