I always show some leniency with this item in the first assignment. With this second assignment, you need to begin to approach this item in a more scholarly fashion. In GOVT, more than almost any other subject, there’s a real temptation to go for the obvious connections. Everyone "knows" about health care, Social Security, traffic laws and etc so you throw in a couple of comments about a couple of those and – bam! – you made connections to the course content. However, your affiliation with this course requires more of you than of most. You MUST be careful that your connections to the content go beyond the obvious, beyond what the average layperson could have said. Always try to make your connections to theory rather than policy.
Most people could throw in a comment about government's involvement with health care, for example, but few people who haven’t been exposed to the material in this course could talk about more theoretical concepts such as the purposes of government, the values pursued by government, the conflict within those values, social contract theory or republicanism. All of those concepts (and more) were in the course material for units 1 & 2 and were relevant to the first assignment. Yet the few connections you made in the first assignment were to general policy ideas (regulate welfare, underprivileged people, the death penalty, etc) that you only mentioned without explanation as to what they entailed or to their relevance to the assignment.
This is the part of each assignment in which you should show off how much you know. You should have already completed margin notes and power point presentations that deal with relevant theoretical concepts so it should be easy to make those connections. If you don't, then you missed the purpose of the assignment and cannot expect to earn full points for it.
READ THE FOLLOWING SECTIONS FROM THE MARGIN NOTES.
