If you’re pining for the carefree days of freshman year, you might want to take a look at the types of questions first-year students face on their initial set of final exams come December. Shortly before the Class of ’10 unleashed its first Dead Week Primal Scream, Stanford asked some instructors to share some typical test questions.
Psychology 1: Introduction to Psychology
James J. Gross
Upon receiving your grades at the end of the quarter, you discover that you received an A on your Psych 1 final exam and conclude that you are brilliant. Then, you notice that you got a D on your physics final exam, and you conclude that the exam was poorly written and unfair. You are demonstrating:
a. self-serving bias
b. behavioral confirmation
c. actor-observer bias
d. naive realism
Answer: a. The self-serving bias is the common tendency to take credit and responsibility for successes, but blame others or external factors for failures.
Statistics 60: Introduction to Statistical Methods
Guenther Walther
At the first full moon of fall quarter, a group of three seniors walks to the Main Quad to kiss freshmen. Each senior asks five freshmen for permission to kiss.
There is a 60 percent chance a freshman wants to be kissed, and a 40 percent chance the freshman refuses. Assume independence throughout.
(a) First consider only one of the three seniors. What are the chances that this senior will kiss at least one freshman?
(b) What are the chances that at least one in the group of three seniors has to go home without having kissed anybody?
Answers: (a) 98.98 percent; (b) 3 percent.
History 106A: Global Human Geography: Asia and Africa
Martin W. Lewis
In the year 1300, African political development could be characterized by:
a. the absence of states, empires, and other large-scale political formations; only
in the Christian highlands of Ethiopia would one have found complex, state-level societies.
b. a complex mixture of state-level and stateless (i.e., organized at the clan, village, or “tribal” levels) societies: in general, the larger, more powerful states and empires were located in the Sahel belt just south of the Sahara and in the highlands of Ethiopia.
c. a complex mixture of state-level and stateless (i.e., organized at the clan, village, or “tribal” levels) societies: the larger states and empires were mostly located in the fertile coastal regions of central and southern Africa.
d. the formation of a large Bantu Empire in the central and southern regions, made possible by the Bantu state’s monopoly on iron production and its sophisticated political organization.
Answer: b
Anthropological Sciences 15: Sex and Gender
Rebecca Bird
True or false: Unlike chimpanzees, female bonobos are almost continuously sexually receptive, copulating even while pregnant and nursing.
Answer: true.
Chemistry 31X: Chemical Principles
Robert M. Waymouth
A classroom contains 10 evenly spaced rows of students. During the Chem 31X final, a student in row 1 releases laughing gas (N2O) and a student in row 10 simultaneously releases a lachrymator (a gas that causes tears). The students in row 8 are the first ones to laugh and cry at the same time. What is the molar mass of the lachrymator?
Answer: 539.25 grams/mole.
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Essay question
English 60/160: Poetry and Poetics
Nicholas Jenkins
“Where there is leisure for fiction there is no grief.” This was Dr. Johnson’s complaint about Milton’s elegy. Consider, using examples from two poems from two different centuries, whether it would be equally true (or untrue) to say of a love poem: “Where there is leisure for fiction there is no passion.”
