MA-RTW Comprehensive Examination Instructions and Sample Questions

[revised 9/02 effective 9/02]

1. If you have questions about these directions or the questions, please query immediately via email.

 

2. Answer one question from Set A and one question from Set B.

3. Label the essays, e.g. A1, B2, and copy the entire question at the beginning of the essay.

4. Incorporation of readings into the essay should be direct, focused, specific, and clearly linked to the discussion at hand.

5. Each essay should be no less than 5 single-spaced pages of 12 or smaller font text.

6. Return your essays electronically as an attached Word document or as plain text email within 72 hours.

Sample questions. (Remember that students are asked to specify some of their major areas of interest and the questions are sculpted, to a degree, around those questions.)

Set A:

A1. Achieving fairness and equality in the classroom is as complex a process as it is important, and it is an undertaking that likely varies from instructor to instructor. In an essay that discusses fairness and equality in the classroom:

  1. Provide working definitions of "fairness" and "equality" and discuss any differences in the meanings of two terms.
  2. Discuss fairness and equality in light of the work of Freire, especially as exemplified in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (go beyond a discussion of "banking education"), and in light of Burke's Rhetoric of Motives, especially as relates to his ideas of "identification" and "consubstantiation."
  3. Linked to "2," provide a brief list of principles, with brief explanations for instructors, for achieving fairness and equality, as you have defined them, in the classroom. Especially pertinent are any restrictions instructors should impose on themselves. (This part should take no more than one page of your essay.)

A2. A friend of mine once opined that "good academics are good little rule followers." That may be truer than we like to admit. In The Social Construction of Reality, Berger and Luckmann note that, after family and along with church, school is the most powerful form of socialization most of us encounter. Focusing on Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions discuss how institutions attempt to seize us into conformity and what levels of conformity are appropriate for an instructor in first-year composition to demand (as an agent of a state-supported university beholden to taxpayers who fund about 80% of students' education).

Set B:

B1. Drawing from the Journal of Basic Writing over the last ten years, summarize the major issues, trends, and changes in basic writing pedagogy and instruction signaled by publications in that journal. For those who work in and design basic writing programs, what are the most important lessons we can draw from this body or work?

B2. A couple of indicators of the power of a theory are it's durability and adaptability; for example, I would consider classical discourse theory powerful in part because it has endured and is adaptable to important functions of current discourse. Is Kinneavy's _A Theory of Discourse_ and its grounding in aims durable/adapatble in relation to later writers who might be considered to more "political" or "progressive." (If so, how do these theorists complement and reinforce one another; if not, what are the limitations of Kinneavy's work vis-à-vis the other theorists.)