Week 08Exercise
Week 08 Exercise: Your political position today
You may think that you “don’t have any politics” or you may be very aware of having a political position.
Your assignment this week is to answer an online questionnaire that will help situate your current position in a political spectrum that will be discussed in depth in the lesson. There are five steps to the exercise:
- Do the Political Compass questionnaire
- Get and save your Political Compass results certificate
- Record your result in the anonymous online tally
- Write a reflection on your results
- Post the certificate and your thoughts to Blackboard.
Instructions
You should probably do this assignment with a computer, rather than on your phone. You will need to save a PDF file from a web site and then upload it to Blackboard as part of the exercise.
1. Complete the questionnaire
Go to
http://www.politicalcompass.org/test
You will be asked six pages of questions. Answer them as honestly as you can (in some cases you may not be sure what you think, but you will still need to choose a side based on what you do know or feel).
When you have completed the test, you will be on a long page that explains the results before showing them to you. Feel free to read this page. The part you will need for your marks is fairly far down on the page.
2. Get and save your certificate
Below your results you will find a link to get a certificate. It says “go straight to the certificate” and it may be next to a caricature of Donald Trump. It will look something like this:
Click the go straight to the certificate page link. You will see a page where you enter your name:
Click the get printable certificate button. You will need to submit this certificate for your marks.
When the certificate page appears, save the page to your hard drive. It should be a PDF file. (If you have trouble saving it, you can take a picture of your screen with your phone.)
Make a note of which of the four quadrants the test suggested you fall into.
3. Enter your quadrant in this anonymous poll, so that we can get a sense of the breakdown of the people in the class by quadrant
Click here and answer the question about which quadrant you fell into.
4. Write a short paragraph or two about your results.
Both the questionnaire and the results page are strongly focused on a U.S. perspective, and the names of many of the figures are hard to read because of the font they have chosen to use. It may help you to see a simpler version of the compass with the major Canadian parties indicated:
I'm not entirely convinced by how high up the authoritarian scale the Liberal and Conservative parties are here, but I think this almost certainly correctly shows the order of our major parties from Left to Right.
You may want to read the part of the Week 02 lesson that discusses this compass before you write your thoughts on your own results.
Answer these questions, and write about whatever else you thought after completing the survey. Write your thoughts in a Word doc or similar and save it. Later you will paste or post it into Blackboard.
- Were you surprised by where the tool positioned you on the spectrum or did you land more or less where you expected to?
- Which major Canadian political party is closest to where you landed on the chart (Conservative, Liberal, Green, Bloc Quebecois, or NDP)?
- If you have you voted in an election did you vote for the party that is closest to you on the chart, or if you have not voted yet but you were to vote in a future election would your vote for the party closest to you? Why or why not?
- Did you learn anything from this exercise that might influence your participation in the democratic process in future? If so, what?
4. Submit your certificate as an attachment and paste thoughts about it on Blackboard in the submission page (found on the Blackboard Weekly Lessons page for Week 08.
If you would rather not sure your results with me, you can take a picture of the part of the certificate that shows your name and submit that, to prove that you did do the Compass exercise.