Category Frances Woolley
How to manipulate student grades
There are times when a professor wishes to raise or lower his or her students' grades. Perhaps a directive has come down from on high: "Instructors need to focus on increasing student success rates." "The average grade in this class is above the departmental norm – grades must come down." Or a professor might wish to maximize teaching […]
The arithmetic of tenure standards
What does it take to get tenure? Some institutions have no written tenure expectations, taking the philosophy: "we can't say what we expect for tenure but we'll know an acceptable candidate when we see one". Of late this approach has been falling into disfavour, and more universities are adopting explicit tenure standards, such as "teaching […]
When you need to know about the “don’t knows”
Canada's 2005 National Graduates Survey asked respondents the following question: "Compared to the rest of your graduating class in your field(s) of study, did you rank academically in the top 10? Below the top 10% but in the top 25%…" The responses are shown below:
Incorporating behavioural economics into intermediate micro
Behavioural economics is fun. It starts off with anecdotes, experiments, and simple generalizations about people's behaviour. People are averse to losses, they go with the default option, and are overconfident. Behavioural economists give fun quizzes. Intermediate microeconomics, on the other hand, is hard. It begins with abstract concepts such as indifference curves and production functions. […]
Office hours: an accidental experiment
Every year I conscientiously hold office hours, and every year only a few students take advantage of them. The TAs' offices are just as empty. Some students even pay for private tutoring, instead of taking advantage of the free services provided by the university. This week, however, I carried out an accidental experiment.
The impossibility of a behavioural welfare economics
Anyone who has taken Econ 1000 learns that restricting soda consumption creates a deadweight loss:
The economics of paywalls
With on-line advertising revenues stagnant at best, and print in terminal decline, newspapers are starting to build paywalls. The economics of on-line media is a little different from the economics of print, and a lot different from the economics of, say, potatoes. The difference is shown in the diagram below.
Too much stuff: the deadweight loss from overconsumption
In a simple supply and demand world there are two sources of waste. Underconsumption is the first. It occurs when taxes, price ceilings, price floors or other interventions prevent the economy from reaching the free market equilibrium. Consumers would like to buy, suppliers would like to sell, but they cannot make a mutually beneficial exchange […]
Who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes?
In other universities the teacher is prohibited from receiving any honorary or fee from his pupils, and his salary constitutes the whole of the revenue which he derives from his office. His interest is, in this case, set as directly in opposition to his duty as it is possible to set it. It is the interest of […]
Why indifference curves are so hard to understand
Look at these curves. I see boobs like this all the time Every year, come exam time, students make mistakes that reveal a fundamental lack of understanding of indifference curves. They write "price" and "quantity" on the axes of their indifference curve diagrams, instead of "apples" and "oranges." They shade in the area below […]
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