POL210-A
Paper #1
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Spring 2025
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Paper #1

  • Due Feb 21 by 10pm
  • Points 15
  • Submitting a file upload
  • File Types pdf

This assignment asks you to choose any human civilization prior to the year 1750. I would like to encourage (but I do not require) you to pick one that is more obscure.  

It's a little bit more complicated than this (see below) but basically your assignment is:

  1. Describe, in broad terms, the political structure of that civilization. Was it more democratic or more autocratic? Or maybe it was somewhere in-between? Explain how. Make sure you define (briefly!) key terms that you use (such as, for example, democracy or representation or consent or whatever). 
  2. Explain one factor that you think may have caused that civilization to be as democratic or autocratic as it was. 
    Hints:
    • A description of how something worked is not an explanation of why. That is, don't tell us that the civilization was, for example, democratic - explain what caused it to be that way. 
    • Think about particular factors at play in that specific civilization at that specific time that may have made it easier for rulers to use coercion, or may have made it more important for them to earn consent. 
    • Stasavage talks about lots of different factors that cause civilizations to be more autocratic or democratic. It's okay to use one of his, or to come up with another one, as long as you explain it.
  3. Use at least one credible source about this civilization, and include a properly-formatted citation. 

Here's the twist. You are actually going to write this paper in several stages, with help, sort of. Here is what I want you to do:

  1. Write, on your own, a brief paragraph identifying the civilization you use, identifying whether you think that it was more democratic or more autocratic, and identifying the factor that you would highlight as maybe partly causing the civilization to be that way. 
  2. Instruct a language model (LM) to write a two-page paper that completes the assignment. The instructions for the LM should be in one prompt (as long and as complex as you would like).
  3. Read through the output and give it a grade on an A-F scale. Be honest. In several short paragraphs that you write yourself, identify and explain ways in which the LM did a good job or did a poor job explaining and applying key concepts. 
  4. In an informal presentation to the class (that is, stay seated and do not use slides) explain in your own words your conclusions both about the civilization you chose and about how well or how poorly the LM did.

To be clear, what you will turn in to me, organized in one file, is:

  • The paragraph identifying your civilization, how dem/aut it is, and what factor can help explain that
  • Your LM prompt and which LM you used
  • The LM's output
  • Your evaluation of the LM output

And then, later, a presentation to the class. 

 

--

 

Additional hints, added after I posted the initial assignment, in response to student questions about it:

  1. You will get a better grade on this assignment if the paper that you turn in is better. This includes the part written by the LM. So you should try to make your prompt as good as possible. That means making it detailed. When I did this myself, I found that it took me about 15 tries - refining my prompt each time - before the output started to look more like what I had envisioned. Good prompts are highly-detailed - mine was about two paragraphs - and include, for example, descriptions of the evidence and conclusions, the citations for the sources you use and descriptions of what they say, and descriptions of the argument. 
  2. This assignment is difficult. I have posted it three weeks before the due date for a reason. If you find this to be easy then you are probably doing it wrong. 
1740193200 02/21/2025 10:00pm
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Total Points: 5 out of 5