Assignments

Grade Calculator

• Grade Calculator

Use this tool to calculate your final course grade and predict what grades you would need on remaining assignments to obtain a desired course grade.

Homeworks

There will be roughly a homework assignment for every lesson. These questions will help check your understanding and mastery of the material, and will be a combination of quantitative, graph, and short answer questions of examples. These will also be good indicators of what to expect on the exams. You may collaborate with other students to work on homeworks, but each person must turn in an individual assignment. Homeworks are due one week from the class period where we finish a lesson, and must be turned in at the beginning of class. Homeworks will be graded by the T.A. as follows: 70% of the grade for completion, and 30% for one randomly selected question. This is to reward students for putting in a full faith effort to try to reach an answer, even if not every answer ends up being correct.

Exams

There will be three exams (one at the end of each unit) including the final exam. Exams are a combination of True/False/Uncertain and Explain, Short Answer, Long Answer, and Problems similar to homeworks. These provide feedback both to you and to me that ensures everyone is progressing on schedule and apprehending the material. This is critical, as the rest of the course, and indeed, any future economics course you take, will build off of this foundation. I will announce the date of each exam several weeks in advance.

Opinion-Editorial

Economic fallacies have always been popular, and journalists, politicians, and talking heads consistently engage in faulty economic reasoning in print and on television. Your task, as a student of economics, is to find some issue discussed in the past year, and write a critique of media discussion of that issue. Alternatively, instead of critiquing the reasoning or statements of others, you may write an advocacy piece, where you propose some economic policy and argue to persuade readers to endorse it. You will be graded both on the soundness of your economic reasoning and the quality of your writing. I would be happy to co-author an Op-Ed with anyone who writes an exemplary Op-Ed. Students who successfully publish their work in a media outlet will earn extra credit on their Op-Ed grade.

No extra credit is available.