Semester in review
Semester in review - 2006, Semester 2 (third year)
It’s that time of the year again. Uni is over for the year, my conference paper is written and exam marks are back. Actually they came out really quickly this year, which was a bit of a surprise! Looking at my subject reviews from last semester where I gave two 10/10, and a 9 and an 8 for the others, it seems last semester was a lot more enjoyable - which it was. However I seem to have received better marks this semester… although one of the lecturers (who I had for two subjects) did seem to have a strange way of scaling marks, which probably explains it. But onto business…
ECOS3902 Advanced Macroeconomic Theory
I remember after last semester had finished thinking how hard third-year advanced micro was. Wow, well this blew that right out of the water. This course is definitely not for the feint hearted, even if it is very useful for going further with contemporary (academic) economic research. It was taught by an American visiting associate professor, Lutz Hendricks - I thought it was rather funny he used his own website with pictures of himself rather than the Blackboard website for the lecture notes - who was very mild-manners, quiet, bookish…academic, in short. He had quite high expectations of the class, and we only got through about half the material he wanted to teach at the start of the semester (going off his topics timeline). The subjects weren’t all that difficult, but that’s in retrospect. After going over and over them I became more familiar with the concepts and the underlying rationale for the methods, but the mathematics could be a bit tricky at times (the topics were the Solow model, the Romer endogenous technology model, the Ramsey general equilibrium model, and real business cycle theory). The focus in this course was very much on the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics - ie, building up a mathematical model from the most basic of assumptions, working out what values to set for the parameters, then testing the models against economic data to see how well they fit and what conclusions can be drawn. In terms of empirical academic work, this course was quite useful. RBC models are still an ongoing development in economics (well, like most stuff, but we looked at papers written within the last five years covering an argument that’s yet to be decisively resolved) and the techniques learnt in the Solow topics will no doubt be useful down the track. Nevertheless, it felt at times the scope was a bit narrow.
This was quite a specific macroeconomics course, taught mostly in the American style of macroeconomic models. It was also entirely in ‘real’ terms, ie, none of the models had money and there were no monetary topics. Actually, the lecturer made it quite clear (explicitly only once but it was a clear theme throughout) of his distaste of many other ways of looking at macroeconomics - specifically Keynesian economics but also related approaches of AS-AD and IS-LM models, behavioural assumptions, etc - and didn’t give much attention to any ideas not explicitly based on microeconomic foundations or that could be empirically tested. In this sense it felt that the economics being taught was, indeed, the dismal science.
A lot of the class found the content difficult to understand. The lecture slides were well set out and clearly explained, but the difficult of grasping some of the content for the first time did confuse a lot of the class (most of it, myself included) and one of the textbooks - Advanced Macroeconomics by David Romer - was heinously complex. The types of questions used as practice and in the mid-semester exam were also difficult for a lot of students, and I remember spending hours and hours going over five or six questions trying to understand them - and that was with his answers in front of me. In economics topics like this it is difficult to find really good question sets, but there are some out there (the Romer textbook had really good, challenging questions, but unfortunately no answers/solutions provided), and I think more could have been done to refer students to practice questions and alternative sources to aid understanding. Nevertheless, despite the difficulties and narrow focus, this was still a useful course, and the challenge did make it enjoyable in parts when you finally understand something.
There are many other criticisms I could talk about, but this review is already way too long. Actually, most of the other problems or vagueness I had concerns the models/theory itself rather than how it was taught (eg, developing a model based on theory, finding it doesn’t fit the data, so manipulating the model so it does… I realise that’s how these theories are developed and tested, but it just seemed rather unscientific. It was theory without a soul).
Enjoyment: 6/10 (but a good challenge!)
Teaching quality: 7/10
Overall judgement: 7/10
Result: 87 (HD)
ECOS3005 Industrial Organisation
I’m not to sure how the scaling for this subject worked. I appear to have done quite well in a subject I didn’t even like, but I’m going to wait until the official results come in the mail as it really does look like the result on the exam marks website is wrong. The course mark was 40% midsemester and 60% final exam. For the midsemester, I got 87.8%. This means I must have received 101.5% on the final exam to end up with the total mark that I did. As I said, odd scaling!
As for the content of this course, it’s quite difficult to say anything positive. Boring, simplistic and patronising. It felt like I was doing second year microeconomics all over again - actually second year (honours-stream) micro was a lot harder. This course was very disappointing for a third-year economics course, and it’s courses like this that gives economics in Australian universities a reputation for being too easy, too narrow and not up-to-scratch. The models and theories learnt were boring and monotonous; the lectures were essentially a simplified step-through of a simplified textbook; the approach was dryly theoretical with few real-world applications. As this was an industrial organisation course I expected a bit more than basic theories of monopoly theory and product differentiation. Some intellectual stimulation from looking properly at a case-study and appreciation of why studying industrial organisation is important was desirable. Actually I was grasping out for any form of intellectual stimulation and, sadly, failed to find any.
That said, the lecturer wasn’t bad. It’s the same lecturer I had for ECOS3020 (below) and his performance across these two courses seems to be drastically different. The industrial organisation lectures, as I said, were just a simplified outline of what’s in the textbook. The tone, at times, felt patronising as the most simple economic concepts and methods - that I’ve been doing for years and I’m sure many other students have too - were presented in a manner akin to teaching early primary school children (although, to be fair, I think that was just the lecturer’s natural style. It just didn’t work in this class).
There isn’t much more I can add. There was new material and there were useful bits, but mostly this was a boring course where I struggled to pay attention and take any interest in.
Enjoyment: 4/10 (un-motivating, simplistic, dry)
Teaching quality: 6/10
Overall judgement: 5/10
Result: 96 (HD)
ECOS3020 Special Topic in Economics (Applied Economics)
This course surprised me for what it was. It was essentially an econometrics course, which combines the more relevant parts of two third-year metrics-proper units to give students the understanding required to complete an honours thesis. Despite the name (“applied” economics) this was largely a theoretical course, aiming to give a broad understanding of a selection of econometric techniques - eg, instrumental variables, two-stage least squares, generalised method of moments, panel data, random/fixed effects models, probit/logit/Tobit models.
The content was tricky, but rightly so. This wasn’t designed to be an easy course. The textbook was quite complicated, and was often a bit difficult to understand, but the lecture notes were comprehensive and well explained. The lecturer (who is the same one as I had for ECOS3005 - and did a much better job here) was friendly, approachable, spoke clearly and always explained content in sufficient detail. The class was only small - 14 people from memory - so it was often quite an informal environment and everyone asked questions. Any difficulty in this course (and there was lots of it!) was difficulty in grasping the concepts and learning them through study, rather than any difficulty in understanding what the lecturer was saying or in what he meant us to learn - quite a refreshing change, actually.
The assessment was quite straightforward - two question sets worth 5%, a mid-semester worth 30% and final exam worth 60%. The mid-semester was quite difficult, and I think the ability of the class was over-rated, so everyone got ‘scaled up’ for it. The final exam was challenging, but not as difficult, and there was nothing in it that didn’t follow quite easily from a comprehension of the lecture material. This was the second time this unit has been taught, and the first time by this lecturer, but it was quite easy to think it had been taught by him for years on end and been well refined in that time. Almost all the content was boring, but it’s used extensively in the economics literature and will be a valuable for the honours year and beyond.
Enjoyment: 7/10 (rigorously boring content but taught well and very useful)
Teaching quality: 10/10
Overall judgement: 8/10
Result: 94 (HD)
GEOG3921 Sustainable Cities (Advanced)
It’s hard not to like geography. Maybe it’s just me, but I find all the topics interesting. This subject was in the grey area between environmental and human geography, which had be a bit uneasy at the start, but that distinction soon faded into irrelevance. This was a course about sustainability. It was more urban planning than geography, but still focused on people and places. Most examples were Australian, and often Sydney, which made what was learnt very easy to comprehend and see in action.
The content of this course was useful, relevant, applicable and valuable. I have to admit, before studying these topics I was only vaguely aware of the concept of ‘sustainability’ - and mostly in the ecosystem sense - and didn’t really know all that much about Australian cities, how they work (and how they don’t), what should be changed, what should be left alone, etc. This course is recommended to anyone choosing third year geography units because its an eye-opener. As with almost all discussions on sustainability (or urban sprawl, climate change, water policy, etc) there really isn’t a ‘correct’ or neutral viewpoint to adopt. Although the lecturer had his own views (which I mostly agreed with), he was still open to other opinions and arguments, and was never judgemental. In a course such as this, that was quite important.
In terms of content, the lectures were well structured (a lot of work must have gone into these!) and the list of extra readings was of a healthy length. However, lectures were PowerPoint slides, which do tend to get a bit boring after a while. Many were filled with text, which made them tedious and often difficult to read from on the printed notes. Phil McManus (the lecturer) knows his stuff well, but his style was often a bit monotonous at times, especially on the less exciting topics (like garbage or urban history). The reading material was a course reader with one (occasionally two) readings per week (ie, per tute). Unfortunately, most were short and it felt like there just wasn’t enough compulsory material assigned. Some of the tute readings were complete rubbish, and I’m sure there are better articles out there to use for these weeks (most, however, were quite well chosen). There was an accompanying text-book for the course, written by Dr. McManus, and it was of a similar structure to the course. Thankfully, the book wasn’t used often (only for one or two tute readings and as a general reference), so we were spared from constant self-quoting, a trap which all too many author-lecturers fall into.
The assessments were fairly straight forward. I did the ‘advanced’ course, which meant I could do a longer essay on a topic of my choosing, and forgo weekly tute papers (a small paper discussing the week’s assigned reading). I chose to analyse the new developments on Rhodes Peninsula in Sydney’s west in terms of sustainable development and urban planning for my essay, and it was a rewarding piece of research (which I’m still continuing with, actually). The one big let-down in this course, however, was the practical work. It was basically two projects on water sustainability (read: tap fittings and glossy brochures) within the university, each consisting of a short report and presentation, done in groups of five. My group consisted of very nice, friendly people, but we were all a bit lethargic to get the work done and a lot of it was of poor quality (the others’ referencing and data skills weren’t much help, either). Analysing water reports prepared for the government and investigating water efficiency in one of the colleges was useful, I’m sure, but didn’t seem to be the best use of a task for a geography class. It got boring very quickly. There was also a bizarre inclusion of CVs in the first assessment (we all had to submit our CV as part of the report), which I still don’t quite understand the rationale behind.
Overall, however, an enjoyable subject, and for all my criticisms I still enjoyed it. It became better as the semester progressed and the topics became more specific. It really made me ask myself - what is sustainability, and why should I (personally) care? The importance of studying our cities with a mind to improving their sustainability, liveability and, yes, profitability became evident to me, and this is a topic I wish to pursue further at some stage, whether on its own or by inclusion in other geography research. This was a worthwhile course that investigated a lot of topics that have been very prominent in the media and political debate recently.
Enjoyment: 8/10 (lectures could be boring but a lot of interesting content and often enlightening)
Teaching quality: 8/10
Overall judgement: 9/10
Result: 93 (HD)