Teaching style
This page explains how why the course is being structured the way it is.
Aligning course objectives with incentives¶
Note all course objectives are active verbs: You should be able to do things after the course. E.g., when you come across an article in a newspaper that you think makes a false claim, you should be able to:
Find a dataset that speaks to the question.
Download it and import it into a Jupyter notebook
Analyze it using suitable descriptive statistics
Make a visualization or a table
Interpret your results
Except for the first step, the course schedule makes sure that you practise these skills every week:
The second half of each lecture introduces the economic content of the week and explains why the topic is important. Ideally, it will whet your appetite.
Short videos and other materials introduce descriptive statistics and programming techniques. You will always be able to go back to them, like a textbook.
All assignments consist of accessing data, analysing it, formatting the results, and interpreting the results. You can get help getting started in the tutorials.
In the first half of the next week’s lecture, we will discuss the assignment and the results, highlighting common mistakes. If you have specific questions about your solution that we did not cover, you may ask in the tutorial.
This is known as constructive alignment: The course is structured in a way that your incentives (the tasks you need to perform to do well in the exam) and the course’s learning objectives overlap. Nerdy note: After the course, you should be able to explain that this is our way of not falling into the trap known as Goodhard’s law.
Why don’t we check the first step (finding a dataset), you ask? Well, given the sheer amount of students, we need some more standardisation. We simply do not have the bandwidth to grade the possible ways you come up with data and analyse those.
Why an exam now?¶
Until last year, the grade was based on the weekly assignments alone. AI tools can now solve most of these assignments, so they no longer tell us whether you can do these things yourself. The exam does. The best preparation for it is still to work through the assignments every week, which is why they give you bonus points.
Peer learning¶
Use groups for peer learning. You gain the deepest knowledge by explaining things to other peers. For example, consider a study group preparing for a complex subject like different ways to calculate inflation in the presence of demand adjustments. When one student explains such a challenging concept to their peers, they not only reinforce their grasp of the material but also discover different perspectives and techniques that others might use to approach the same problem.
Tutorials¶
Tutorials are mostly for working on the current assignment together with others and getting help from the tutors when you are stuck. Everybody submits their own assignment, but we strongly encourage you to work on it in groups.
Things will be new to many of you (coding, statistics, thinking critically about numbers), all the while you find yourself in a completely new environment. Do use the tutorials in order to support you getting started!