ECC2010: intermediate macreconomics

27% mst - 27 mcq. focus on theory.
8% online assignments - easy 8%. lecturer just needs to see that you've tried and you get the 8%
5% tut attendance - abebe makes it clear when you need to participate and when you dont which is great!
60% exam - hard af. very different from practice exams

good unit, well run. my mark doesnt reflect how much i thought this unit was well run. i prioritised other things during crunch time for this unit and this is the result. make sure you understand each topic as they intertwine with each other in the end. siew does a good job explaining macroeconomic topics. the is/lm model may seem very abstract but it gets easier the more you dig into it. this unit is very much all application on the exam so make sure you know your theory down pat or else the exam is going to get you. math is less important here than ecc2000. its mostly conceptual based.

siew ling yew

Yes, 2 w/ answers

3 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture

no

1x 1 hr tut
1x 2hr lecture

sem 2 2019

p

10% Weekly MyEconLab Questions
30% Mid-Sem Test
60% Exam

LECTURE:
The lecturer is quite slow. Nearly every week we didn’t cover all the content. It got to the point where he had to take a topic out of the mid-sem because we didn’t manage to cover it at all. It was honestly quite difficult to sit through the entire lecture. A huge issue I have with the lecture was that there was pretty much 0 explanation for how to complete calculation questions. A lot of how I learnt to answer them was from getting questions wrong on MyEconLab which then provides an explanation.

TUTORIAL:
Tutorial is 1 hour. In normal cases, I value tutorials a lot. I find them great to strengthen my understanding of the content. However, this was the first tutorial that I felt I got nothing out of, so it’s the 1st I’ve ever felt better off skipping. I attended maybe 3-4 tutorials (I wanted to give it another chance). All you discuss in the tutorial are the weekly assignment questions from MyEconLab and sometimes a few additional questions. I personally found 0 value in it but if you’re struggling, I can see it helping as the answers are discussed to help you understand it. At the very least, I recommend attending a few of the tutorials to see if it helps you or not.

ASSESSMENTS:
Weekly MyEconLab ‘Assignment’ (10%):
This was… interesting. Basically a free 10%. Every week we were given an ‘assignment’ which was just a set of questions based on that week’s content. The questions are done on MyEconLab and you have unlimited attempts. It’ll also give feedback or point to where you went wrong which I found very helpful. The ‘interesting’ part is that he mentioned something on the lines of you only needing to do 4 of the assignments? He wasn’t entirely clear on it so I’m not too sure but regardless, I’d advise to do them all anyway.

Mid-sem Test (30%):
Initially it was meant to be, I think, 2 hours long with 4(?) questions but it was then cut to 1 hour and 3 questions due to seating issues or fitting everyone in the lecture hall. Structure involved the first question being true or false questions and the other 2 being predominantly calculation questions (with possibility of theory questions). For the true or false questions, you have to explain why it’s true or false to get credit. Merely stating ‘true’ or ‘false’ gets 0 credit. For the calculation questions, this is where the textbook and MyEconLab comes in. I don’t think the lecture explains at all how to answer the calculation questions. MyEconLab has a bunch of questions outside of the assignment that you can do to practice. I found this incredibly helpful as you can see guides of how to answer the questions. The questions from MyEconLab are taken from the textbook, sometimes with changes in numbers, but MyEconLab has answers.
The lecturer specifically stated that some questions will be questions you’ve ‘never seen before’, and he mentioned that sometimes he takes questions from postgraduate textbooks and dumbs it down to our level. This was true. My initial reaction to some of the questions was ‘wtf is this’, but if you know the content you’ll become aware of what he’s trying to ask and it’ll become like a normal question. For example, he gave us this random growth model that we’ve never seen before but after substituting the variables given, it’s clear he’s talking about the endogenous growth theory which we learnt.
Average and median score for the mid-sem was around 19.5/30. My advice is to read the textbook and do MyEconLab questions until you understand the models/theories and why x might affect y, and are able to do the calculation questions well because as mentioned, lectures don't explain how to do them!
Also, a sample test was given which I'd say replicated the actual one decently.

EXAM (60%)
2 hours long with 5 questions. Structure is the same as the mid-sem so again, the first question is true or false and the rest are calculation questions with some theory questions. At least in this semester’s exam, there were more ‘policy’ questions than I anticipated, that is, here’s some info, how would you advice the policy maker in implementing monetary policy? The last question was bizarre though. I’m not sure if I was missing something but it didn’t seem to test any of the content we learnt. He gave us these random new Keynesian Philips curve equations (we didn’t even cover the regular Philips curve!) and asked us to analyse these equations in certain situations. The last question infuriated me, since it basically asked us to recommend policy action based on this never before seen model. We didn’t really learn how to recommend policy action. Ignoring this question though, the calculation questions aren’t particularly hard. If you do some practice, it basically becomes routine since you’ll generally just have to do the same thing but with different numbers. The calculation questions are also mostly what you find in MyEconLab or the textbook.

Qingyuan Du

No. Instead he pointed to specific questions from the textbook and gave us the answers to them.

2 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture (Lecturer didn’t want to record but had to because unit was over-enrolled )

“Macroeconomics” by Abel, Bernanke, Croushore 8th or 9th Edition
Personally, I’d recommend it. The textbook gives the details that the lecture and lecture slides don’t give. MyEconLab is also directly tied to the textbook content (Note: you don’t need to buy access, it’s given to you).

x1 2 Hour Lecture
x1 1 Hour Tutorial

Sem 1, 2018

92 HD

(Outline the various assessments which make up the subject and how much each counts for)
5 % Participation, 15 % Mid-semester test, 80 % Final Exam.
Exam was answer 3 of 6 questions. Questions are long response, with an exam duration of 2 hours (so essentially 3 x 40 minute questions)

Being a core unit for the Bachelor of Economics course and the Economics major, it has quite a sizeable cohort ~160. The course was divided up into 7 topics:

IS-LM Model (Goods and Financial Markets)
WPS Model (Labour Market)
AD-AS Model
Inflation and Unemployment (Phillips Curve)
Monetary Policy and the RBA
The Global Financial Crisis
Public Debates after GFC, the Australian Case

The first 4 weeks covered the first two topics. These topics are quite important and form a basis for the following topics. The mid-semester test covers the first two topics. The test is quite difficult. My tutor, Li Huang (who was a very good tutor), said that the previous year’s fail rate (I’m assuming that means < 50 %) was around 70 % of the cohort, where as it was ‘only’ around 50 % this year. The mid-semester test was in the same style as the tutorial questions and final exam. The final exam only covers the remaining 5 topics, however, understanding of the first two are very necessary.

And here comes my biggest gripe with the unit: exams test memory of theory more than it tests application of the theory. This is more or less true for the first year unit as well (ECC1100), where you are expected to remember then regurgitate all the information from the lectures. Simply answering the question sometimes isn’t enough. It is expected that you will be able to write everything you know about the topic. The upside of this is that ECC2010 has a reasonable tolerance for cramming. You can get away with relying on memory for a reasonable chuck of the content.

I personally did not enjoy this unit very much, but it certainly has some very interesting content. Doing this unit as a first year student, it is definitely a step up in terms of the complexity in the concepts, but quite doable. It is mainly a amendment to the content taught in ECC1100, which you’ll find out to be largely too simplistic, and is replaced with quite different concepts and intuitions. However, as per the rant above about the assessments, I found it a bit enjoyable.

The lecture slides are a mess. They can get hard to follow without watching the lectures as there is a lot of shorthand notes in them. For example, increase/decrease is simply denoted as and change in as . Most parameters were given by their mathematical notation (eg. interest rate = i, unemployment rate = u, output = Y, etc...)
While it’s easy enough to understand, it gets very messy.
Another thing to note is that solutions to the tutorial questions are not uploaded onto Moodle, so it is up to you to turn up to tutorials. Mind you, they are very helpful, and also worth the 5 %.

Michael White (Semester 2)

Didn’t go to any lectures, but he seems to be quite easy to understand. He goes quite slowly which got quite annoying for me.

Yes, last year’s was available, but without solutions. No sample exam was really required as exam questions are in the same style as the tutorial questions.

1.5/5

Yes, with/without screen capture
Yes, with screen capture.

Blanchard & Sheen, Macroeconomics 4e. Not really needed, but there were a couple tutorial questions from the textbook. Also, readings for each topic are provided from the textbook.

2 x 1 hour lectures
1 x 1 hour tutorial

2014, Semester 2

N/A