Not a quiz, but.....

This one I posted in Facebook back in 2013.  It is still apropos.

le début des vacances
twas five days before christmas and wielding a grin,
lanny was happy 'cause he got his grades in.

Happy holidays to one and all. 

Course Grades Have Been Uploaded Into Banner

I just posted this.  It seemed to accept my upload.  Several students were given ABS grades, so I will be making changes to the Banner grades, as I receive the work from the students who currently have an ABS.

Grades Have Been Upload Into Moodle

This includes the last Excel homework on the Shapiro-Stiglitz model, the Blog Posts Second Half, and the Comments Second Half. 

Here is some information about how the scores were determined.  There were 6 posts in the second half.  (I had originally planned for 7).  On the Comments, everyone got 8 points for free and then I simply counted how many posts you commented on and multiplied that by 7.  If you made more than one comment on your post, I didn't count it here.  However, I did account for it in the scores on the posts themselves.

For that, each person got 30 points for free.  Most people did all the rest of the posts.  Then I made a qualitative determination on your performance based on the posts and the comments and whether you seemed to incorporate my comments.  There is no algorithm here, just my subjective interpretation.  I'm something of a strict grader on this, so nobody got 210 points.  Indeed nobody got 200 points.  A score of 190 was quite a good performance.  I save the remaining performance because all of you can do still better.

There are comments to accompany the points.  For those who missed some posts, the comments may have referred to that rather than to your general performance

Finally - if any of you want to become a professor some day, note that it is a nice job most of the time, but on days like this the job doesn't pay enough.

Bah, Humbug. Scrooge was an economist!

When gift exchange goes awry.  For your amusement only.  I thought you'd find the title of this piece interesting.  There is an economics paper  published in the American Economic Review (the top journal in the U.S.) back in 1993 that got all of this started.  You can find the paper here.

The Economics of Wasteful Spending: The Deadweight Loss of Christmas | PBS NewsHour via kwout

Not Course Related - I need some advice

My sister is turning 70 in 4 weeks.  I need an original idea for a present for her.  All thoughts on the matter are welcome as comments or send me email.

A little humor and....

.... if you've never seen it before an essential part of anyone's education about American culture.

Some Follow Up On The Assessment By Students In The Final Blog Posts

Since I started to teach this class, the blogging has been a feature that students mainly like while students are more divided on the Excel homework.  I want to draw some meta lessons from that (as if we're looking down on the class from on high).

I've only taught one non-economics course at Illinois, which was a CHP class back in 2009.  (I have been involved in some adult education short courses, but not through the university.)  The title of the class was Designing for Effective Change.  It was the first time I taught with blogging and I published an article about it in Inside Higher Ed.  I learned several things from that experience.  The two I'll mention here are (1) the need to have aliases (though I'm guessing that potential future employers wouldn't be able to find your blog even if you used your real name) to help get students comfortable with blogging out in the open and (2) the benefit of reacting to what students say without trying to steer the students to some correct answer.   Had I taught an Econ class as the first experience with blogging, I don't think I would have come up with that.  So it was a happy accident. Sometimes we benefit from serendipity.  And we definitely benefit from learning by doing.

I was trained in graduate school on how to do math models for economics and I lectured on them for many years.  At the graduate students level, it went pretty well.  At the undergraduate level, the results have always been far more mixed.  Except for some spot lectures to clear up student confusion, what I've found is that a significant fraction of the students either can't penetrate the lecture or show no inclination to try, so within 5 minutes they have a glazed look on their faces.  The video lectures are a partial solution to that.  Experience suggests that iff students can complete the Excel homework without watching the video all the way through, most of them will do that.  But if students are bored with the face to face lecture and won't watch the video all the way through, what's a better alternative?

Now I'm going to put this a different way.  The class is heterogeneous regarding comfort with the type of math we used in this class.  The math types or those who are considering going to graduate school in economics, are quite comfortable with the modeling.  Other students are not.  Can the others still benefit from the Excel homework?  I don't have a good answer to that question.  But I do want to note that in class yesterday I suggested trying the Excel homework again, with a different alias, and see the second time through if you're comfortable with the material or if it is a struggle.  Practicing on the homework this way should make you more familiar with the model and improve your confidence for the final Moodle Quiz.

I want to note the following, which is not about our course per se but about having facility with models.  When I was a campus administrator, I would make simple models of the situation on the fly.  It helped to discuss the situation with colleagues.  I don't know that other administrators did that, so I'm pretty sure it was my economics training that made me feel the need for doing it.  This is different than applying pre-existing models that you've been taught, though the supply and demand paradigm is quite useful in this way; sometimes a pre-existing model can help.  But mainly it was doing something from scratch, keeping it pretty simple, and then knowing how to get some implications from that.  If you can develop that skill, it might help you when you reach the managerial rank.  It probably won't help at all, in your initial position, though you might get a better sense of what your company is doing by trying to have a model fit the situation.

My schedule after today's class session

I plan to start working on grading the blog posts for the second half of the course (and the comments too) sometime tomorrow.  I've got non-school things to work on this afternoon.   When that is done I will upload grades, including the last Excel homework on the Shapiro-Stiglitz model.   I don't know how long that will take, but I will make an announcement to the class after doing this.

If you'd like to meet with me for whatever reason, I'm happy to do that.  Morning are probably better for me, but if you need to do that in the afternoon, we'll figure something out.

Regarding final grades, I will try to do them on the December 18, after the last Moodle quiz.  Again, I will make an announcement to the class site when that is done.

As an FYI, instructors got a massmail yesterday from the Registrar, which said that the last time for entering final grades is January 3, at 2 PM.   One of the things we talked about early in the semester but then didn't follow up on is scheduling.  When Final Exam Week ends so close to the winter holiday, you get a deadline like this after the Christmas Holiday.  This makes no sense to me, but if you don't get a grade in one of your classes, this may be the reason why. 

Consider Moving to Finland

This piece is an interesting read and might provide a good backdrop for considering the 2020 election.

A Few Oddities (Instead of a Quiz)

Longest Palindrome in English - A palindrome reads the same forward and backward (ignoring the punctuation and capitalizations).

Doc note.  I dissent.  A fast never prevents a fatness.  I diet on cod.

Paul's Law - Very useful for parents with young children.

You can't fall off the floor!

Theorem:  All horses have an infinite number of legs.

Lemma:  All horses have the same color.

Proof of Theorem: Take your average horse. It has two hind legs and forelegs. That makes six legs. Six is an even number, but it's an odd number of legs for a horse. The only other number that is both even and odd is infinity. So a horse has an infinite number of legs. You may say you can find a horse with other than an infinite number of legs. But by the lemma - That must be a horse of a different color.

From Today's Chronicle of Higher Education

In the last class we discussed examples of the triangle problem.  One of those happens at Universities, where the marketing arm has one view of what the university should be putting out there for public consumption while the faculty and students have quite other views.  It's a mere coincidence that this piece appeared so soon after making that point, but it's pretty telling (and it is about a different U of I, not us).

You should be able to access this piece if you are on the campus network.

As Universities See State Funding Threatened, Will They Be Less Outspoken About Climate Change?

A few different announcements

Reminder: The last Excel Homework is due this Wednesday evening and is on a modification of the Shapiro-Stiglitz model where the monitoring intensity becomes a choice variable of the firm.  The post on that homework has a link to the Excel file.  That is where you should post questions, if you have any.  Please don't post questions about that homework to this post. 

Reminder 2: The last blog post is due this Friday.  The prompt was given on the Friday before the break.  For your convenience, it is reproduced below.

Note: This is being assigned the Friday before the Thanksgiving break, but the post isn't due until two weeks later. This is the last blog post - You have two options to write to. The first is the prompt I've used last year and in all prior years.  The second is to do a Williamson-like critique on our class based on two governance decisions that were made. One of those decisions was to not require attendance. The other was to allow soft deadlines. 

 1. The traditional final prompt: This is the last post to be done for the course. I'd like it to be both a review and a critique. Can you offer up some lessons learned from the course about Organizations that you didn't have already going in? What about the pedagogic approach we took with the way the live class was structured and the online blogging. Are there any take aways from that? Please spend a bit of time talking about your process for doing the blogging and the Excel homework -including the preparation you do and how long it all takes. Finally, talk about things you would have liked to see in the course but didn't or ways the approach might be improved. 

 2. Williamson-like critique The two rules to focus on are: (a) that attendance was not required and (b) that deadlines were soft. Please describe how those rules impacted your own behavior. Then consider how the rules impacted the class as a whole. Finally, if you were to recommend changes in the approach, how would you modify these rules to produce better outcomes?

Last Moodle Quiz:  The final exam schedule for our class is below. 

So I've scheduled the last quiz in Moodle to include the scheduled time within the 36 hours that the quiz will be available.  It will open at 9 AM on Monday, 12/16, and close at 9 PM on Tuesday, 12/17.  

As I write this the campus wireless is down, but Moodle is up.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that there will be no technology issue then.

Grades Uploaded Into Moodle

I just finished a grade upload.  In the Excel category there was the Principal-Agent Homework and a bonus item - added because the total for the category should be 200 points.  In the Blogs category I tracked the last two posts - one on Conflict, the other on the Triangle Principal-Agent Model.  In the Concept Quiz category there were two items uploaded.  The quiz on Conflict, and a bonus item to make the category total to 100 points.

End of Holiday Quiz

Many of you have an IT interest so I thought this one was appropriate.

Q: How many software engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: None.  It's a hardware problem.

I got this one from my son, who is a software engineer.  If you want to contribute jokes to the class collection, you must get over the bar set by this joke.  (I hope that doesn't discourage you.)