Synthesize the full year into one connected narrative from the Constitution through Reconstruction, building and defending a claim about the nation's founding ideals and how honestly it has lived up to them.
This year traced one long, connected American story: a nation built on the bold claim that "all men are created equal" (week 2), which then wrote slavery's protection directly into its founding compromises (week 4); a democracy that expanded for some while forcibly removing others from their homelands (weeks 15, 19-21); a Union that finally went to war over the exact contradiction it had never resolved (weeks 22-31); and a Reconstruction that tried, with real but incomplete success, to close the gap between the nation's ideals and its practice (weeks 33-35). A symposium is a formal discussion where participants present and defend a real argument, backed by evidence -- exactly what this final week asks you to do with the whole year's material.
A strong symposium argument has three parts: a clear claim, at least two specific pieces of historical evidence supporting it, and an honest acknowledgment of complexity -- a counterpoint, an exception, or a genuine difficulty your claim has to account for. "The Constitution was a triumph of compromise" is a claim; citing the Great Compromise as evidence while also acknowledging the Three-Fifths Compromise as a genuine moral failure within that same triumph is what makes the argument honest and strong rather than one-sided.
Mastery looks like: They can build and defend a complete symposium argument: a clear claim, at least two specific pieces of evidence, and one honestly acknowledged complexity, drawing accurately on material from across the whole year.
Common stumbles: Presenting only a one-sided claim without engaging honestly with counter-evidence or complexity, or supporting a claim with vague impressions instead of specific historical facts.