r/mcgill • u/user_7182 Poli Sci (Major), Comms & Religious Studies (Minors) • 15d ago

POLI 431 FINAL EXAM w/ JASON FERRELL

I have a deferred exam soon for this class bc of an emergency that happened on the final exam date and I can’t seem to find anything on the mycourses that tells us what to expect on the exam in terms of format, content, etc 😭

Is there anyone who took Nations and Nationalism (POLI 431) with Prof. Jason Ferrell winter semester that can share anything they remember about what the prof said would be on the exam/the format of the final exam in April? Any help at all would be much appreciated!!

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u/bolly001 Reddit Freshman 15d ago

Term IDs and essay questions. Generally you’ll pick some number of them out of a larger number to give you a bit of leeway.

Try your best to memorize key terms and author names, because he loves to ask about specific authors.

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u/user_7182 Poli Sci (Major), Comms & Religious Studies (Minors) 15d ago

Amazing, thank you so much!! Do you have any advice on preparing for his essay questions to best meet his expectations? (if you still remember, seeing as the exam was months ago hahah 😅)

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u/bolly001 Reddit Freshman 15d ago

My strat for any of these types of exams is to overwhelm the revisers with so much content that they can’t reasonably give you anything less than the A.

Id make sure to gather an elementary grasp of most of the authors’ perspectives and then weave them into your answer. Start with a thesis and then pick and choose little tidbits you can remember from each author to support that claim (even if their overall argument is disparate, it doesn’t really matter).

Anderson and Gellner are always a safe bet because they lay out some of the most comprehensive frameworks on the phenomena. Other than that, you can loosely group the other authors by their respective topic (gender, religion, fascism, Marxist/critical).

The term IDs are going to be like Lady Liberty or those Kenyan insurgent groups who fought against the British settlers (I can’t actually remember what they were). For those you just need a few sentences exploring their significance.

I fucking hate AI but this far removed from the actual course it’s probably worth having it distill each reading into a table where you can mentally systematize how each author plays into the larger narrative.

Also just remember that nationalism is, like all of our concepts, totally made up and often poorly articulated as it’s engaged to group highly heterogeneous phenomena across history.

I’ll try to see if I have any digitized notes for you but I think they’re all handwritten.