Assessment of Module Goals

Unit 5, along with an exam question, is the summative assessment for the module. Refer to Unit 5 for details on that primary component of the summative assessment. An example exam question can be found below.

The summative assessment is designed to assess the overarching module goals:

1. Students will be able to predict and evaluate the societal impacts (risk) of fault motion (e.g. damage to buildings and infrastructure) based on an understanding of the fault type and specific characteristics of a fault (orientation, area of potential slip, fault displacement vector).
2. Students will be able to recognize andcategorize active faults using LiDAR, InSAR, or other imagery and recommend geodetic data set(s) for a given scenario considering the strengths/weaknesses/capabilities to find characteristic features for different fault types.
3. Students will be able to synthesize the longer-term behavior of faults (i.e. from the landscape) and the short-term behavior of individual earthquakes to determine recurrence intervals, potential magnitudes of future earthquakes, and hence forecast seismic hazards.

Example Exam Question

The India-Eurasia plate boundary in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a transform boundary with 20 mm/yr of relative left-lateral motion accommodated along a single fault. Assuming that you did not know its exact location beforehand, describe the process through which you would identify this fault and its potential seismic hazard—which data, observations and tools would you use, and in which order?