Reminder - Discussion Group

There is definitely no obligation for you to do this, but if you are interested in participating in the discussion group please lease me know.  Thanks.

Final Exam and Course Grades Uploaded into Moodle

Note that the Course Grade is in the Feedback area of the grade report.  I will upload the grades into Banner in a few minutes.

I believe the grading was generous.  I hope you feel likewise.

Happy Holidays.

Project Grades Uploaded

I did have to do this manually, but I've now done that and checked my work.  Each member of the team got the same grade and received the same comments.  The comments were about the presentation only, since that was new.  I gave extensive comments on the paper already.

I've uploaded all the PowerPoints to a folder.  If you are interested in seeing what your classmates have produced, you can take a look there.

All grades but the final exam have now been uploaded.  So you should know where you stand going into the final and can prepare accordingly.

Good luck on your other exams.

The Projects Are Graded

I am having a technical issue importing what I've got into Moodle.  If needed I will manually post these grades, but it would be much better for all if I can simply import them from my spreadsheet.  I will get this done in the morning, one way or the other.

Generous Grading on the Projects

It was not my intention to cause additional stress for any student about the virtual elevator speeches.  Yet I may have done that inadvertently with my previous post.  So let me assert here that I will target the grading for that component of the class so the average is around 110 points.  (108 points is 90% of the maximum, 120 points.)

The point of the previous post is that while making the elevator speeches is seemingly straightforward, doing it well is a challenge that requires thought and much practice to cultivate a sense of taste about what makes for a good presentation. The class project was merely an introduction to that.

Grades Uploaded

I have now uploaded grades for the last Excel homework, your comments in response to mine on the blog posts, and your blog posts in the second half.

I need to take a break.  Then I will get to the projects.  Realistically, I will not have that grading done till tomorrow, and possibly not till Monday.  But you should know where you stand in the course heading into the final, which is Thursday.

And, one more time, Moodle will actually say there are a total of 1020 points allocated for the course, because I gave the bonus on midterm 1 and had to up the max score on that as a result.  I will use the grade distribution reported in the syllabus to determine your letter grade.  In that there were 1000 points allocated.

Last Year's Final

You can use this for practice.  We will review it in class next week.

Grades have been uploaded into Moodle

Sorry that this took me quite a long time.  But it is there now.  Please note the following.

1.  The exam questions were each worth 40 points.  So the maximum possible score was 120.  (On the test itself, it said each question was worth 50 point.  That was a mistake based on last year's exam.)

2.  The average score was about 84%, which is not bad.  So unlike the first midterm, I didn't give any further points to pad the score.

3.  Note that on the Excel homework, there are actually 9 of these.  So you get 10 free points, which is what is in the item labeled bonus.

4.  You can see the class grade distribution in a file labeled Midterm 2 Results.

Midterm 2 has been graded - exam scores will be uploaded in a few hours.

I need to take a break now.  I will upload not just the exam scores but the recent Excel homework and blog posts tracking will also be updated.   I will post the grade distribution for the exam.

Tomorrow I will read you blog posts on reputation.  If you haven't done one of those posts yet, you can still get that in so that I will read and respond to your post.

Reminders/Happy Thanksgiving

1.  There is a blog post due on Friday.  It is on reputations.

2.  The last Excel homework has been posted.  It is on the Shapiro-Stiglitz model.  There is a video for it that you should watch first.

3.  If you are going out of town for the holiday, have a good time.  If you are staying in the area and want ti meet with me, about your paper or about anything else, I'd be happy to do that.

Last Year's Midterm 2

Is available here.  You can use it for review.  We will go over it next Monday.  Please come ready with questions.

When sending me email about your project...

...Please copy your teammate!

There is no Excel homework for next week

We will extend the discussion of the principal-agent model, but without doing further math.  This should also free up some time for you to work on the first drafts of your papers.

Survey Results

For those of you not in class today, we did an experiment for 5 minutes where everyone put away electronic devices during that time.  I told a story about why I wanted to perform that experiment.  Afterward, a survey was administered to get the reactions of students.

I posted a link to the results in Moodle.  Not surprisingly, they were varied.  I found the comments interesting.  I suspect you'll find them interesting as well.

As I have a PowerPoint already prepared for next Monday, I will make a video of that.  Whether I do so for future sessions, I'll leave open now.  I'm still hopeful that we can generate some back and forth on the issues and I'd much prefer that to giving a straight lecture.

Grades for Blog Posts First Half have been uploaded

This covers the five posts starting with your experience with teams and ending with managing income risk.  I did not count the post about your alias.  There are points allocated - the maximum was 125.  And there are some comments about your performance with suggestions on how to improve that in the second half of the course.

For those of you who did all the posts and got that done in a timely fashion, please know that I enjoyed this exercise of reviewing your work.   If you would like to meet with me one-on-one to further discuss your blogging, I would be delighted to do so at a mutually convenient time.  Please email me with a couple of times that works for you and we'll try set something up.

For those of you who did not do all the posts or got them in late and who have not previously spoken to me about your situation, please know that eventually i lost my patience on this and some of that carried into the comments.  It is a lot of work to provide this form of assessment and I get no pleasure at all from being your taskmaster rather than being your teacher.  With several of you I suggested that we do have a face to face meeting to see if we can right the ship for the second half of the course.  That would benefit both you and me.

No blog post this weekend/Graded exams returned in class on Monday.

Because I have exams to grade there is no blog post due this weekend.  It gives you some time when you can meet with your teammate and get going on your project.  Please let me know when you have an idea/topic for that.  I want to give the Okay on your projects and possibly tweak what you intend to do, to assure that it relevant to what the class is about.

In class on Monday I will return the graded exams.  We will also do a brief review of the exam, before starting in on our next topic.  Interesting your preparation before the exam offers some good real-world evidence about the topic, so we will discuss that too.

Please look at this before you start the next Excel homeowrk

Each of these should be reviewed before doing the next Excel homework, which assumes that such a review has been performed.  They should be familiar already, based on what you've been exposed to in Econ 202 and 203. There may be some new stuff on risk preference. I'd be curious to learn what is old hat and what is new for you. Note that there is a bit of overlap between each of these. Nonetheless, I strongly encourage you to review them all, so you have a firm understanding of the fundamentals. The second one emphasizes and algebraic approach. The third, a graphical approach. You should be familiar with both.

Notes on the Math and Philosophy of Probability  (This is a pdf file.)

Increasing Risk and Risk Aversion (This a video in YouTube.  You can find a link to the PowerPoint file on which it is based in the description of the video.)

Expected Utility and Jensen's Inequality (This a video in YouTube.  You can find a link to the PowerPoint file on which it is based in the description of the video.)

You should be able to get through all of this in under 45 minutes.  Of course, the less familiar it is to you, the longer it will take to get a good understanding.

Student Questions About The Coming Midterm

Student questions about the exam should be posted here.  That is where I will answer them.  There already are some questions and answers posted.

Assignment of Teams for Class Project

A big part of what we will do in class tomorrow is to assign you to project teams.  We will spend quite a bit of time describing the project and seeing if we can get your team into a project it is willing to undertake.  I encourage you to attend this class session.

Last Year's Midterm 1 - for practice

You can view and download a copy of the exam from last year.  The format this time around will be identical and the content will be similar.

Next Monday in class, part of the time will be devoted to a review of that exam.  It would be very good, as preparation, that you write up you own answers to the questions ahead of time and that if you have any problems or issues in doing so that you come ready with these to the review session.  It will be a much more productive activity that way.