The second exam will be Tuesday, April 28.
You may not use your notes or reference books during the exam. You will not need a calculator.
The exam will consist of about 15 questions. Most of your answers should consist of one or two sentences. While you are unlikely to get points off for writing too much, try not to write long, rambling answers that say the same thing over and over.
Be sure to give the number of answers that a question calls for. For example, if a question says "What are two possible explanations for....", give two possible explanations, not one or three. If you give more answers than a question calls for, you will be graded on the worst ones. For example, if a question asked "What is the official mascot of UD?" and you answered "A chicken, or maybe a duck, or a horseshoe crab," you'd be graded on the horseshoe crab.
The exam is cumulative, so you are responsible for all of the material covered in first study guide , plus everything covered in the all the lectures and readings. Be sure you understand what the correct answer was for each question on the first exam.
Here are some concepts that you should be familiar with. Some are just vocabulary, such as "allele" and "genotype," and you should just learn what they mean and be able to give an example (such as "A" for allele and "Aa" for genotype).
For the evolutionary processes, you should think about the kinds of experiments that provide evidence for that process. For example, for "sexual selection" you should know not just the definition (difference among genotypes in mating success), but also some experiments that could demonstrate it (comparing genotype frequencies in females and their young, to infer the allele frequencies in the fathers; comparing genotype frequencies in pregnant and non-pregnant females; directly observing mating pairs and determining their genotypes). It may help to think of whimsical examples in your favorite organism, of the type I try to make up in class.
Note that the subject of the last two lectures of this section, different methods for detecting natural selection, does not translate into short terms that I can put on this list. It will be a very important part of the exam; there will be several questions where I describe an organism and some kind of genetic variation that might be affected by selection, and I ask you to describe an experiment to detect that selection. So be ready for that.
Return to John McDonald's home page
This page was last revised April 22, 2009. Its URL is http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/495studyguide2.html