Extra Office Hours

Economics 325

Midterm 1 Info

Logistics:

The exam will be held in class (same time same place as lecture) on Monday October 3. Make sure you are on time, as I cannot give extra time to students who arrive late. The exam is worth 25% of your course grade.

Only simple, non-programmable calculators are allowed. No text-storing devices are permitted. Your calculator must be (and look) non-programmable, otherwise it is a prohibited device. No other electronic devices (including iPods, phones, etc.) are permitted. Students must bring their student ID to all exams in this course.

Extra Office Hours:

I will hold extra office hours this Friday from 1:30-3:00 in BEC 354. These office hours will be for Econ 325 only (not mixed with my other class, as my usual office hours are).

Preparation:

Flipping through the notes and recalling key concepts is not sufficient preparation to pass the exam. The way to learn this material is by working problems and thinking about them. Each problem that I pose on a problem set should generate you several ideas of variant problems that you can practice. The most basic example of this is if I ask you to shift a curve up, you shift it down. With a little creativity you can go much further than this.

I encourage you to study in groups. In fact, I listened to an hour long program on the radio recently that suggested (among other things) that students learn especially well when they learn from each other. You might not get the intuition for something that someone else gets. Even if one person knows the material better than another, the process of teaching, drawing lots of pictures, and discussing intuition will be rewarding for all. Groups of three are probably an ideal size, though two can work fine.

Coverage:

The exam will cover the review material, externalities and public goods. So the first three sets of lecture notes and the first two problem sets. Take the review material seriously. Material for the exam will be drawn from the notes and problem sets. Anything you’ve seen is fair game, though I tend to lean away from memorization of facts and towards major concepts and working with models in my testing.

Nature of the Exam:

The exam will be 60 points and you will be allowed 75 minutes to answer it, which means a good student can allocate roughly 1 minute per point to questions and have 15 minutes left over to look over the exam. Make sure you pace yourself so you don’t leave easy questions blank.

Note that the practice exam I have posted was only a 50 minute exam. Your exam will be longer. The exam will contain multiple choice questions, a couple True/False/Uncertain questions, and some short answer questions. The T/F/U and short answer questions will be similar in nature to problem sets. Naturally, the exam will be shorter than a typical problem set, because problem sets are meant to keep you occupied for longer than 75 minutes.

A Word on Cheating:

I’ve been at UVic for a few years, and in that time I’ve sadly had to give up my naïve prior expectation that cheating would not be a problem in Canada. I realize most students here don’t cheat, but enough do that I will take preventative (and if necessary punitive) measures against it. Do not be caught with scraps of paper, notes on the floor, looking at others’ papers, or trying to communicate with others during the exam. You won’t enjoy the treatment you receive. This is done for the sake of the majority of students who toil honestly, only to find themselves competing for grades/jobs/positions in grad school with a few people who took the dishonorable path of cheating.