For our exams we do what historians do and that is write historical essays.  The "questions" are designed to provide you with a context and suggest a thesis for you to argue.  You then construct an essay supporting your thesis by providing evidence from history.

Example below:

Question:  Discuss whether the following statement serves as a simple, yet profound overview of U.S. History during the period before 1865.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.  [Let us resolve] that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of Freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth.”

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Student’s Essay: [somewhat condensed]

When Abraham Lincoln made his speech at Gettysburg, he was addressing a nation torn by the strife and turmoil of the Civil War.  Yet Lincoln was able to provide a brief, yet profound, overview of America's history to explain and give significance to the loss of so many soldiers in this pivotal battle.  He was able to reorient his countrymen in his own time, and his words have continued to inspire down through the ages ever since.

From the planting of the first English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard in the early 17th Century, to the hills of Gettysburg, Americans had continuously pursued freedom and liberty. The Puritan leaders, such as John Winthrop and Roger Williams, who saw America as a “New World”, a place to grow and start afresh, passed much of their passion down the generations. The acknowledgement of God remained one very constant factor.  Abraham Lincoln here sets the mission of the Union within the context of the enduring values of liberty for the people, under God. These values had underpinned the Colonial period and been a driving force throughout the Revolution.  The "four score and seven years" [87] stretch back to the Declaration of Independence.

In that Declaration's phrase “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” we are reminded of the goal confirmed by the founders of the American republic in 1776.  They recognized that the Continental Congress had failed to resolve the issue of Negro slavery.  Abigail Adams also pointed out, freedom did not yet encompass women either.  The Gettysburg address turned attention to that long sought goal of building a nation on freedom and equality and soon after his address Lincoln would issue his Emancipation Proclamation which represented a major step forward in that struggle.  Abraham Lincoln truly felt that freedom for blacks would improve the state of his beloved Union. He did not live to see the outcome, for his assassination on April 14, 1865 occurred at the very beginning of the hard fought process.  Blacks came out in huge numbers to show their gratitude and sorrow over the loss a man with a vision which finally included them

Lincoln’s resolve that the nation would have a new birth of freedom depended on the preservation of the great experiment; a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.  The United States was the only democratic republic in the world and Lincoln saw himself as responsible for preserving the Constitution and the independence which Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin and thousands of others had lived to create and died to preserve.  The long struggle was, in truth, not simply the birth of a new nation but of a new way of people living. Thus the words of Lincoln inspired the hearts of weary Americans and continue to do so to this day.

America’s founders did not foresee the dreadful scenes of the dead or wounded in battlefields such as Gettysburg across the nation. They dreamed of a Union which, although new in its ideals, untested in its endeavors, and amateur in its policies could be a place where people could be free from the horrors of tyranny and oppression.  It was this ideal which kept Americans from weakening against their foes, whether that foe was France, Spain, Britain, or the most terrible foe of all, their own brothers. They persevered against all odds to carry on the dream of freedom.

When Francis Scott Key witnessed the atrocities of battle in 1814, while himself held prisoner, and composed the words, “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed, at the twilight's last gleaming” he put into creative language the pride of his country.  It was this pride that at the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln sought to rekindle.  Because of his knowledge of history and his understanding of the great significance of what the Union represented, he was not willing to stand aside and let others tear it apart.  He spoke for and to every man, woman and child of America, past, present, and future as he stood on the hill at Gettysburg that day.  Abraham Lincoln's profound summary of American history helps every generation do its part in the struggle for a "new birth of freedom."