This study guide is a guide, not a contract.  All the material in the text, reader, and lectures is fair game, regardless of whether it is explicitly mentioned here.  But this guide does honestly tell you what I consider most important to study for the exam.

The test will cover all the material to date (i.e., up through the material on utopian and scientific socialism).

My lectures are intended to give you an overview of the issues, and if there are any questions from the lectures, they will be "short essay" questions (i.e., with answers approx. one paragraph).

The assigned chapters in the text are more detailed and fact-oriented than my lectures, and the exam questions on the text will concentrate on facts and terms (i.e., the definition of terms and concepts).  I don't test on detailed dates, but I do expect you to know the approximate period being discussed and (where relevant) which event came after what other event(s).

The exam questions on the readings will require you to know at least one and hopefully both of the following things:  (a) the major point(s) the author was trying to make;  and (b) the major argument(s) by which the author tries to prove h/her point.  Note that for many of the readings I have provided online notes to help you understand these main points.

The exam will be approximately half multiple choice questions and half short essay questions. ("Half" means in terms of time, not number of questions.)  All the other exams will look like it.

You can find a short sample exam here.  This exam is an abbreviated version of a real exam given last semester.

Approximately half of the short essay questions will ask you to define terms & concepts;  the other half of the short essay questions will be on the required readings (i.e., in the reader).  You should concentrate on those terms that appear in the text in boldface.  (These are ones given in the Glossary.)  You should also know terms and concepts that appear in the text's section headings.  You will have a good deal of choice in the other short answer questions, although choice will be inversely proportional to the importance of the topic.

If you have the time during the exam, it is often useful to include relevant information surrounding the core answer. Please note, however, that this does not mean a "data dump".  Irrelevant information tells me only that you've memorized lots of stuff, not that you understand the subject.  It's the understanding, not the memorization, that I'm looking for.

To study efficiently:

• Look at the sample exam so you'll be familiar with the exam format.
• Check the syllabus to see specifically what we've covered.
• Review the online notes I've posted on the various topics. (But be aware that these are just my ad hoc efforts to summarize what I plan to say. They aren't necessarily complete, particularly so when it comes to handling the multiple choice questions, which will depend on a careful reading of the text.)
• Re-read the text chapters, making sure you know and understand the various terms it uses. Pay attention to chapter titles, section titles, and terms in bold-face. (The latter appear in the glossary.) You should be able to answer a question like, "Define xx [the concept], give an example of xx, and make sure it's clear to me why the example is an example of xx."  Note that just memorizing glossary definitions will not allow you to answer the last two parts of such a question.
• Go over the readings I've assigned, paying most attention to the ones I discuss in class. (You are responsible for all assigned readings, covered or not, but it should be obvious that I lecture on the topics I consider to be the most important.)  Be sure that for each reading you know (a) its main purpose or point, (b) the flow of the main argument, (c) the name of its author/s, and (d) the historical forces at work at the time it was written.  (You should therefore know approximately when each one was written.  The online review notes will help here.)   I don't expect you to memorize dates, but I do expect you to know what historical period these various things fall into.  Thus for example I wouldn't expect you to have memorized that Locke published his Second Treatise on Government in 1690, but I would expect you to know that it was during a period a few hundred years ago in Great Britain when there was a lot of religious conflict, esp. involving the divine right of kings.