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 late, you are likely
to miss at least some of the experiments on that day. In the process of
keeping records of the results of classroom experiments, we will also be
keeping records of attendance and participation. Your attendance record
will affect your grade as explained below.
Laboratory Reports, Lab Partners, and Home Work
Each week you will be required to complete and hand in lab
reports based on the results of in-class experiments. You can tear
out the lab report pages from your textbook and hand them in at the
next week's section meeting. Lab reports must be turned in on
time in order for you to receive credit. The data
for your lab report will be collected from the experiment conducted in
your section and will be made available to you on the Web, usually
by the next day.
We strongly encourage you to 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. Section leaders
will help to arrange partners for lonely hearts.
Each chapter has a section called "home work," which consists of
a series of questions about the theory underlying the experiments.
The home work will not be collected or graded, but you should try to do
all of the home work from each assigned experiment. If you like, you can
work on this together with your lab partner(s). Your incentive for doing
the home work is the fact that home work questions will correspond
closely to questions asked on in-class quizzes and the final examination..
Quizzes
There will be six scheduled, in-class quizzes, all in the Monday 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 need to have a No. F1712 scantron (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.) for
each of the 6 quizzes and for the final. You should also bring
a #2 soft lead pencil to mark your scantron. The scanner does not read
black pen marks at all and is not entirely reliable with blue pen marks.
Also, you need to know your class id number (the id you use
in experiments) when you take the tests. 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. We will make the experimental data from your
section available in the form of an Excel file as well as in the
form of a text file. For those who haved not used a spreadsheet
before, we will offer a tutorial on the use of spreadsheets at the normal
lecture time and place on Monday, January 11. 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. If you already know how
to use a spreadsheet, you can probably afford to miss this lecture.
If you insist on not using a spreadsheet, the next best thing is a calculator
that can calculate means and standard deviations.
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 total earnings relative to the average
of all students in the class will determine a score which accounts
for about 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.
Lab Reports 10%
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).
Quizzes 40%
Your grade for the quizzes will be based on the sum of your scores on the
best 5 of the 6 quizzes. That is, we will drop your worst score.
There will be no make-up quizzes.
Final Examination 30%
The final examination will count for the remaining 30% of your grade. The
exam will cover material from the entire course and will be offered only
at the regularly scheduled time, which is March 23 at noon.
Grade Distribution
You should be aware that "grade inflation" has not taken place in
the economics department. The department recommends a grade distribution
of 12% A's, 36% B's, 45% C's, and 7% D or F. 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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