PREPARING FOR THE MIDTERM AND FINAL EXAMS
Ling 220 Summer 2014
Midterm exam: Monday June 16, during normal class time and location
Final exam: Monday Aug. 11, 3:30-6:30, Location TBA
Policies
Be familiar with department standards for taking exams:
http://www.sfu.ca/linguistics/undergraduate/student-resources/department-standards.html
Bring a No. 2 pencil for scantron
Format of exam
-Scantron
-categorical answers: multiple choice, true/false, short answers
-questions will be based on real problems, however, which can require serious thought
and writing out answers on scratch paper
Content of the exam
-Exam questions are based on all the course material to date
-Materials: assignments, tutorial problems, lectures, readings, class discussions
-Second half: there will be a natural focus on morphology, phonetics, and phonology,
with particular attention to making observations using natural classes and the correct
linguistic analysis based on these observations; this will be about %75 of the questions of
the exam
-general issues: be sure to understand the issues and themes that cross-cut all the sections,
i.e., the characterization of linguistic intuitions, importance of rules, selecting the correct
hypothesis among many possible hypotheses
Preparing
1. Go over your notes (not just before the exam) and identify anything you don’t
understand. Attend to the smallest detail.
2. Go over the assignments and tutorial problems
3. Do additional practice problems, on website or in the book
4. Meet in study groups and ask each other questions
5. Treat these things like physical exercise, a little bit every day
Note:
This year’s exam will be totally new, so there is no practice test for it. Practice tests are in
general not good ways of learning the material. But the suggestions above are.