It’s good to know what “passage ID” means before heading into Literature Humanities. As an incoming freshman, Lit Hum is obviously the least of your concerns right now, but I for one am bored out of my mind and want to put out some IPs that haven’t been covered by any other appblr, studyblr, or Columbia blog. I went through some of my old posts and realized that I never quite explained what a passage ID was in my Lit Hum “Core in Review.” So now, here’s an IP explaining what you’ll be asked to do way too many times during your first year at Columbia.
Essentially, passage IDs are quotes, and they range from a length of one sentence to 8-12 lines. To your gratitude, professors ensure that what appears on the test is exactly as it would have appeared in the text, except for the font. So, if you see something in verse, you’d better know intimately which texts ever used verse, and if it’s in prose, you’d better eliminate any poetry or Shakespeare. What you have to do is state to a satisfactory degree 1. what text it’s from, 2. the author, 3. the speaker, and 4. the immediate context. Word of warning, any proper nouns that give away the text or context will be omitted in some way. Here’s an example:
Question: “To be or not to be, that is the question.”
General Answer: You’d have to say that this is from Hamlet, by Shakespeare, when Hamlet is giving his lil soliloquy on suicide after his mental state was in question in the last scene. You would also have to explain why exactly Hamlet was contemplating suicide, giving a very brief summary of the events that directly caused this particular quote.
Passage IDs also typically require 5. a brief close reading of the quote, with the end of the response offering 6. a look at how the quote plays into general themes of the text. So, with these six parts in mind, here’s a response I would have constructed for Hamlet’s quote:
Full Answer: This passage is from William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, where the titular character gives his soliloquy on suicide. Hamlet, having realized that Claudius killed his father and Ophelia spurns his love, among other reasons, seems to go rather insane. Although the authenticity of his craze is ambiguous to both the characters of the play and the audience, at this point in the play he still has a clear barrier between his antics and his true self. In true soliloquy manner, he reveals his inner thoughts with this speech on comparing death to sleep. The brevity of this quote exemplifies Hamlet’s ability to view the bigger picture: he condenses his whole debate on the merits of living versus death into six simple words. This simplification provides contrast with the rest of the soliloquy, where Hamlet delves deeper into the nuances of suicide, suggesting that similarly, while Hamlet on the surface seems to be an easily understandable person to the rest of the characters, his madness on the outside only serves as a leeway into the entire complexity of his character and thought.
I hated that I just voluntarily did schoolwork but that’s a satisfactory example of the kind of work you would be required to do in about 5-10 minutes. Passage IDs can show up both on reading quizzes, which are about 10 minutes long, and midterms and finals. I forget how long those exams are but the idea is that you spend no more than 10 minutes on any one passage ID. So although I said that you don’t need to read any of the texts, you do need to know them well enough to at least bullshit your way through the context and close reading parts of each passage ID. Best of luck if you don’t.
