Course Requirements and Grading
Participation
For many courses, attendance at section meetings and lectures
is incidental to the reading assignments and homework. In such courses,
students may quite rationally choose to skip class when they are busy.
But in this class, in order to participate in the experiments and to discuss
the results, you have to be there.
The experiments will be held in your section meetings.
(Sections will meet during the first week of classes.) To
get credit for attendance you must go to the section for which you are
registered. Since everybody participates in the classroom experiments,
it
is important that you show up in class on time. If you
come in after the experiments start, you will usually not be allowed to
participate. When we record the results of classroom experiments, we will
also record attendance and participation. Your attendance record
will affect your grade as explained below.
Laboratory Reports, Lab Partners, and Homework
Each week you will be required to complete and hand
in homework based on the results of in-class experiments and your lab notes.
You can tear out the homework pages from your textbook and hand them in
at the next week's section meeting. Homework must be turned
in on time in order for you to receive credit. The data
that you need for your lab notes will be collected from the experiment
conducted in your section and will be made available to you on the web
three days after your section meeting.
You are welcome form "lab partnerships" of two or
three persons from the same discussion section to work on your lab reports.
Partnerships can turn in a single lab report, signed by all members.
Quizzes
There will be five scheduled, in-class quizzes, all in the
Wednesday lectures. The dates of these quizzes are found in the Schedule
of Lectures and Quizzes on this web page. Each quiz will be based on
the lab reports and homework on the corresponding experiment(s).
The way to ensure that you do well on the quizzes is to do and understand
the homework.
Instructional Gear
Low-Tech Stuff
For doing your homework and your lab reports, you will need
some colored pens. You will need black, blue, green, and red.
You will need to purchase 6 No. F1712 scantrons (This
is the reddish kind where you fill in bubbles for your name and id number,
not the puny little bluish kind where you just write your name.) and bring
them with you to scheduled quizzes and exams. You should also
bring a #2 soft lead pencil to mark your scantron. The scanner does not
reliably read blue pen marks, so if you fill in your scantron with pen
you are likely to lose points. Also, you need to fill in your perm
number on your scantron when you take quizzes and exams. When you
get your scantron, you should fill that number in the bubbles for id number.
High-Tech Stuff
You can save yourself quite a bit of time in doing your homework
by using a computer spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel, which is installed
on all of the university's public-access computers and is widely available
on home computers. The experimental data from your section will be available
in the form of an Excel file as well as in the form of a text file.
If you have never used a spreadsheet before, this is a good time
to learn a skill that you are likely to find useful for many years.
Basis for Course Grades
Attendance at Experiments 10%
When we conduct the experiments, we will take attendance
by collecting the personal information sheets in each session.
You will get a perfect attendance score if you miss no more than
one experiment. Of course if you miss an experiment, you won't get any
earnings that week to count toward your market performance score.
Performance in Markets 10%
We will record the payoffs that you received in market experiments
over the course of the semester. Your earnings for any day are scaled according
to the average earnings of persons in your class with the same buyer values
or seller costs as yours. Your total score over the term will count
for 10% of your course grade. There is a certain amount of luck involved
in day-to-day outcomes, but if you participate in all or nearly all
of the market experiments and pay attention to what you are doing, you
are almost certain to do well.
Home Work 15%
In order to receive credit for a lab report, you must turn
it in on time (that is, at the section meeting following the experiment).
We will include your
scores on ALL homework assignments to calculate your
homework score.
Scheduled Quizzes 45%
Your grade for the quizzes will be based on the sum of your
scores on the best 4 of the 5 quizzes. That is, we will drop your
worst score. There will be no make-up quizzes.
Final Examination 20%
The final examination will count for the remaining 20% of
your grade. The exam will cover material from the entire course and will
be offered only at the regularly scheduled time.
Grade Distribution
You should be aware that "grade inflation" has not taken
place in the economics department. The department recommends a grade distribution
with 12% A's and 33% B's. Typically there will be 10-15% D's
and F's, but the awarding of these low grades depends on absolute
levels of performance.
In order to maintain uniformity of grading standards with
the other sections of Econ 1, we must follow this distribution fairly
closely. This means that those who earn A's in this class really have something
to be proud of and those who earn C+'s must realize that in economics,
C+ is a respectable grade, just about in the middle of the class distribution.
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