You will have 60 minutes to complete 45 multiple choice questions in this section of the exam.

There will be 4-5 passages that you will read and questions that follow.

If there are 4 passages, then you should spend 15 minutes per passage.
If there are 5 passages, then you should spend 12 minutes per passage.

The questions are chronological, meaning they follow the order of the passage. For example, the answer for question two will be found between question one and three.

There will be 5 answer choices (4 distractors and 1 answer).

2 distractors can usually be easily eliminated.
1 distractor is 50% correct. Be careful, the correct part is usually at the starting of the answer, but it becomes clear it’s wrong by the end of it.
1 distractor is mostly correct, where almost all of the answer seems correct but a small detail makes it incorrect.
The answer will always be 100% correct.

Requirements: answer each question in ~2-3 sentences.

1. What part of the exam felt the most challenging or successful, and why?

2. Which free-response question (Synthesis, Rhetorical Analysis, or Argument) did you feel most confident about? Why? 

3. What aspects of your writing (e.g., thesis, evidence, commentary, organization) do you feel were strongest? Weakest? 

Are morals simply determined by outcomes alone or determined varying on the manner in which you achieve the outcome? 

Lexicon #19: Morals are personal principles of right and wrong shaped by culture, upbringing, and individual beliefs.

Lexicon #20: Ethics are systematic rules or guidelines for behavior, often established by a group, profession, or society.

In essence, morals are personal; ethics are collective.

This activity is a treatment of some of the issues thrown up by a thought experiment called “The Trolley Problem,” which was first outlined by the philosopher Philippa Foot, and then developed by Judith Jarvis Thomson and others. But before we start properly, we need to ask you four preliminary questions, so we get a sense of the way that you think about morality. There are no right or wrong answers. Just select the option that most corresponds to your view.

The brakes of the trolley that you are driving have just failed. There are five people on the track ahead of the train. There is no way that they can get off the track before the trolley hits them. The track has a siding leading off to the right, and you can hit a button to direct the train onto it. Unfortunately, there is one person stuck on the siding. You can turn the trolley, killing one person; or you can allow the train to continue onwards, killing five people.

Should you turn the train (1 dead); or should you allow it to keep going (5 dead)?

Do you turn the train or allow the train to keep going?

Marty Bakerman is on a footbridge above the train tracks. He can see that the train approaching the bridge is out of control, and that it is going to hit five people who are stuck on the track just past the bridge. The only way to stop the train is to drop a heavy weight into its path. The only available heavy enough weight is a man, who is also watching the train from the footbridge. You can push the man onto the track into the path of the train, which will kill him but save the five people already on the track; or you can allow the train to continue on its way, which will mean that the five will die.

Should you push the man onto the track (1 dead); or allow the train to continue (5 dead)?

Do you push the man onto the track or allow the train to keep going?

Okay so this scenario is identical to the preceding scenario but with one crucial difference. This time you know with absolute certainty that the man on the bridge is responsible for the failure the train's brakes: upset by train fare increases, he sabotaged the brakes with the intention of causing an accident. As before, the only way to stop the train and save the lives of the five people already on the track is to push the saboteur off the bridge into the path of the train.

Should you push the saboteur onto the track (1 dead); or allow the train to continue (5 dead)?

Do you push the man onto the track or allow the train to keep going?

The man, having avoided being thrown in front of the runaway train, has been arrested, and is now in police custody. He states that he has hidden a nuclear device in a major urban center, which has been primed to explode in 24 hours’ time. The following things are true:

1. The bomb will explode in 24 hours’ time.

2. It will kill a million people if it explodes.

3. If bomb disposal experts get to the bomb before it explodes, there’s a chance it could be defused.

4. The man cannot be tricked into revealing the location of the bomb, nor is it possible to appeal to his better nature, nor is it possible to persuade him that he was wrong to plant the bomb in the first place.

5. If the man is tortured, then it is estimated there is a 75% chance that he will give up the bomb’s location.

6. If the man does not reveal the location, the bomb will explode, and a million people will die: there is no other way of finding out where the bomb is located.

Should the man be tortured in the hope that he will reveal the location of the nuclear device?

Do you torture the man or not?

It is often thought to be a good thing if one's moral choices are governed by a small number of consistently applied moral principles. If this is not the case, then there is the worry that moral choices are essentially arbitrary - just a matter of intuition or making it up as you go along. Suppose, for example, you think it is justified to divert the train in the first scenario simply because it is the best way to maximize human happiness, but you do not think this justification applies in the case of the fat man on the bridge. The problem here is that unless you're able to identify morally relevant differences between the two scenarios, then it isn't clear what role the justification plays in the first case. Put simply, it seems that the justification is neither necessary nor sufficient for the moral judgement that it is right to divert the train. Overall, “The Trolley Problem” seeks to answer whether we are moved by our morals based on simple outcomes or the manner in which one achieves the outcome.