THE TEACHING ECONOMIST - William A. McEachern 
| Home | About The Teaching Economist | Contact the Editor | Support |
Issue 24, Spring 2003
William A. McEachern, Editor
The Grapevine
In the last couple of years, Charlie Holt of the University of Virginia has written about 25 interactive Web-based programs that are available for use by teachers in their courses. The experiments include auctions, markets, individual decision problems, bargaining, voting, asymmetric-information games, and public goods games. To get an idea of what's available, you can review the Experiment Selection Menu at http://veconlab.econ.virginia.edu/admin.htm. To use the programs in your course, you need a "session name," which you can get from Professor Holt via email (holt@virginia.edu). Please provide your school name, the course you teach and three initials in the email message.
In the Fall 2002 issue (all back issues are available at http://www.swlearning.com/economics/mceachern/economist.html), I discussed my problem of falling 50 exams short while passing them out in a large section of principles. My solution was to offer students the option of either taking the exam as scheduled or taking a similar exam the next class. I asked you for other solutions. Richard Bryant of the University of Missouri-Rolla suggests using price points to allocate exam slots. You could begin by offering two points to students willing to delay the exam until the next class. If you get too many takers, you could lower the price. Since half my class, or more than 150 students, volunteered to take a later exam even without extra points, the market-clearing price of getting 50 students to postpone the exam would likely be negative points. I asked Professor Bryant what he thought of awarding negative points. We agreed that students would claim that subtracting points would be unfair, even as they willingly agreed to such a deal. He said that if he had thought of this solution on the spot, he probably would carry it through to its logical conclusion, even if this meant point cuts. "That's what makes our profession, at least in academia, so interesting."
John Solow of the University of Iowa has a solution to the out-of-exams problem that would work best when the exam is entirely multiple choice with bubble sheets. He suggests splitting the last 50 copies of my five-page exam into two parts (pages 1-3 and pages 4-5). Distribute these parts to each of the last 100 students, alternating first part and second part. Then have students trade once they are done with their half. He notes that students would have to be monitored more closely for cheating. This seems to be a practical solution on a final exam since there is no "next class" in which to offer another exam. But it would still be messy. If questions were distributed evenly across pages, those with pages 1-3 would get 60% of the questions and those with pages 4-5 would get 40%, so the latter would be done sooner on average and would have to wait for the others to finish. If time is tight, the students forced to wait would lose time. Splitting the exam into pages 1-2 and 3-5 would even this out a little since page 5 is likely to be a partial page. Still, the last 100 students would claim, with some justification, that they were at a disadvantage compared to students with a complete set of pages. But, again, if you have the nightmare scenario of running out of exams on the final, Professor Solow's solution could still save you much grief.
In the Fall 2002 issue I discussed my biggest teaching goof and asked for other contributions. Here are goofs by three other instructors. I will call them Ben, Tom, and Jerry.
Ben's slip was minor but annoying. He assigned a reading on the first day of class but soon realized that it was too difficult. So he withdrew the assignment the next day. He thought students would appreciate his sensitivity. But some students had already begun the assignment, and others, smelling blood, claimed to have begun it. They said he was being unfair, which made for a chilly start to the course.
Tom gave an essay exam but failed to inform students what each question was worth. When no other information is available, students assume questions are weighted equally. Because the exam was too long, many students didn't finish. They were shocked to learn that the final few questions, the ones they didn't get to, counted more than the ones they answered. The result was a minor revolt and bad feelings all around. Students can allocate their time efficiently only when they know how much each question is worth—only when they know about relative prices.
Jerry signed so many over-enrollment authorizations for his principles course that his first exam was chaos, with many more students than seats. Apparently, a number of students showed up for the first time only on exam day. Many students had to sit on aisle steps in the large lecture hall. Jerry was not there that day; he left proctoring to his teaching assistants. But he got an earful later. Students complained that other students had cheated, not a surprising possibility given the crowding, the instructor's absence, and the fact that there was only one version of the exam. Jerry's solution? Next class he announced that all exams would be thrown out and a new one given. Despite a student uproar, that's what he did.