Political Science

Major Field Test

The Major Field Test (MFT) in Political Science

Every semester, the Political Science Department administers a comprehensive exam for all its graduating seniors. This is the Major Field Test, devised by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), with headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey, as a way of allowing a general assessment of how well political science majors have come to understand their field.

In recent years, universities throughout the United States have begun seeking to evaluate more systematically the effectiveness of their teaching. Students and their parents, who spend thousands of dollars in college tuitions costs, are entitled to know how well that money has been spent. Without some clear measure of what graduating seniors know about the subject matter they have studied, it is difficult to determine what has been accomplished in four years of higher education.

The Graduate Record Exam (GRE) has long provided such a measure for students applying to graduate school. However, beginning in 1988, the Educational Testing Service (creators of both the SATs and the GREs) has also provided a test – the Major Field Test (MFT) – that can now be used to measure the knowledge of all graduating seniors.

From the time these achievement tests were first introduced, they have been used by the Political Science Department at Hofstra as a way of assessing its teaching strengths and weaknesses. In addition, because these tests are taken in colleges all over the nation, the Department has been able to use them as a basis for comparison with many other political science departments in American colleges and universities. Over the past dozen years, Hofstra's political science majors have almost always performed at a level above the national average.

Thus, the Major Field Test helps the Political Science Department to assess how well you have learned about politics and government during these past years, and in effect, also how well we have taught you. It is important, however, to remember that the MFT in political science is taken in several dozen colleges around the nation. Because the nature of political science offerings vary from college to college, and because what is stressed even in courses with similar titles varies from professor to professor, few, if any, students are able to answer all the questions asked on the exam. Because political science is such a wide-ranging field, it is assumed that the average student will find many of the questions beyond their scope of knowledge.

What matters most, however, is that in the end, both political science students and faculty gain a much clearer picture of how well we are working together to learn about our field, and how we compare to students and faculty at other institutions of higher learning. The Major Field Test will, therefore, constitute the final requirement you must complete to be eligible to be graduated from Hofstra as a political science major.