Since I did not write many comments on the exams, here is a more complete explanation of the system used to grade the exams. You can ignore any marks on the cover of the exam; they were to help keep me organized while I was grading.

Part I: ID's

Three points per correct answer. Partial answers given partial credit. People who gave more than a single fact were often "forgiven" for other partially incorrect information in the same question, so long as it didn't display a lack of knowledge about what the item was in the first place. Some answers needed to include specific facts:

Question 5: Hijrah: you had to say it was in 622 CE.

Question 9: Prof. Jackson proofed all the questionable answers, if you think you had points deducted wrongly, take it up with him.

Question 10: # of surahs in the Qur'an: 114, but if you said 30 (the number of sections) I gave you a point for knowing something about how the Qur'an is segmented. If you were within 10 of 114, I only deducted a point. Anything else was -3.

Question 12: Husayn ibn 'Ali: you had to give more than "son of 'Ali", since that's given in his name.

Question 13: mawla/mawali: you had to give the non-Arab context.

Question 14: dhikr: you had to say this is a Sufi practice.

Part II: Short Answer

Questions 1 and 5 caused the most problems. For question 1, you needed to clearly state what the difference was between the Sunnah and hadith, not just define them. For question 5, you needed to get in both the lesser/minor occultation and the major occultation with at least the right century for a date and some idea of who this affects (12er Shi'a only!)

Part III: Essays

The 15 points for each essay were distributed thus:

0-3 points	essay organization	was there a coherent organization?
0-7 points	basic answer	correct, full
0-5 points	examples	did you give useful examples (names, dates, ideas) and were they correct?

From all the essays which earned 15 points, I chose 2 top essays (in one case three, because I couldn't decide on only two) which will be on the web site for you to see examples.