Study Guide - Final Exam - NS4 - ThTh 4 pm section

Fall 2002 (Zellmer)

The final exam has 40 multiple-choice questions. Bring your 882 Scantron form. There are no essay questions on the exam. Remember that the Preliminary Study Guide posted on this website contains the list of most of what we learned this semester. This same list will be on the front page of the exam.

I hope all of you arrive safely at the final exam. Once you do, you can look at the first question, along with the graph that goes with it, and begin an analysis of your good fortune in being here. I'm sure the people who escaped getting mowed down by your vehicle are thankful too. We will look at attitudes and fallacies, at experimental designs, and the ways we establish Good Evidence, instead of mere opinion and posturing. We will also look at the Mechanisms involved in vehicular causality.

If you have a cold and bring your Kleenex, don't write any notes on it about Causality, or anything else. We wouldn't want any Chaos to result, would we? Of course, you could try this. After all, what are the odds that two people would get caught trying the same trick? And remember, the Burden of Proof would be on you to explain the presence of those notes (or would it?). (Hint, hint, nudge, nudge.)

And now for something completely different. Moving into the realms of Astrology and mystical predictions, I invite you to examine a little scene involving Astrology, fortune cookies, and monster SUV's. Remember how to use our list of fallacies of human cognition from the Baloney Detection Kit. (They are listed on the first page of the exam.)

Remember how to construct a Formal Argument from the first part of the course. Now that we are at the end, we can look very critically indeed at the validity of the premises that make up part of the argument. Our Baloney Detection Kit will come in handy for that.

Check over the tricks of the psychics. Think of all the money you will save not having to make those calls to 900 numbers. That alone should pay for the fee hikes now under consideration in Sacramento.

We have had two Baloney Detection Kits (BDK) presented in this class. For review we used Dr. Hall's BDK, but now go back to the very beginning and look at the SEARCH formula from Weird Things. It makes a return visit.

We can now combine a Formal Argument with a BDK to root out bad, weak, or irrelevant premises in our search for Bigfoot. Don't forget the list of fallacies and other things on the front of the exam. (See the Preliminary Study Guide for a copy of the Front Page of the exam.) You don't have to write these on your hand.

We will combine analogies, our BDK's, and anything else we learned for an examination of magnetic healing.

Remember trying to figure out the difference between Deductive and Inductive arguments? It's back. All that old stuff about claims, opinions, issues and topics is back too.

We had quite a hard time getting the hang of Asking a Good Question when doing hypothetical reasoning. Why is that?

The Blue Pill or the Red Pill? Consider the philosophical implications of an alien computer creating a virtual reality, as was done in the movie The Matrix.

Let's not forget all the hard work we did in Moore, Chapter 2, on analogies. Review the terms we learned in this chapter, and how arguments by analogy can be made and refuted.

We took a quick look at the premises behind the various kinds of Creationism. Now let's apply the tools of critical thinking to a few of these premises.

On the front of the exam you will find listed the Five Criteria of Adequacy. There is a question that tests your ability to apply these to hypotheses.

We used the various fallacies of inductive generalizations and pitfalls of human perception and behavior a lot in this course. Check over the terms and make sure you remember what they all mean.

We spent a lot of time looking at how we test the claims made by the Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) people. There are questions about this.

I've tried to work in at least one question that requires some knowledge of each of the student presentations that were done. Review the terms and concepts from these.

What is the real meaning of the term Null Hypothesis? I made rather a big deal over this in class, and mostly used it for statistical tests of possible causality in medical or forensic testing.

Once we have formed a hypothesis, how do we make a useful prediction that can be used to test this hypothesis? How do we determine if a hypothesis is better or worse than some other hypothesis?

Finally, how do we use Critical Thinking to make predictions about the future? What fallacies and pitfalls await us? What good is all the CT stuff anyway?

Happy Holidays, and Good Luck on the exam!