ECON30010: Microeconomics

5 assignments due fortnightly (top 4 are worth 35%). One 2-hour long exam (worth 65%).

This is a challenging subject but one that you can do quite well in if you put in the effort. Students who have done Calc 1-2 and/or Mathematical Economics are placed at an advantage for the Constrained Optimisation topic and naturally anything that has to do with utility maximisation. Being familiar with various different functions offered an alternate approach to this section of the course as you could often just graph the indifference curves yourself and perform whatever analysis you needed to carry out (although, there are often other much simpler solutions).

Students who have done Competition and Strategy are at a massive advantage for the Game Theory segments of the course as I'd estimate that up to 80% is essentially the same.

Georgy is an excellent lecturer who is very passionate about the subject. He was trialling an approach this semester where pre-recorded lectures that went through the content in great detail were posted before live lectures. These were good for those who are less mathematically inclined but I didn't really find it to be particularly useful (as the pace was a little too slow). Live lectures moved rather quickly on occasion but Georgy was keen to make the experience as interactive as reasonably possible, which certainly helped. You absolutely need to be attentive during lectures for this subject because the slides are difficult to go through from scratch by yourself.

The tutorials ranged from being almost useless to rather helpful. This is because some of the problems required long and rigorous proofs which never really came up elsewhere (not even on assignments) - on more than one occasion, I spent the entire tutorial copying down pages of meaningless algebra that the tutor went through because there was nothing else to do. On other occasions, the tutorials offered useful practise problems for assignments and the exam. I had three different tutors over the semester and two of them were excellent.

The assignments are not easy by any means. Mind you, they're doable, but they'll require a decent amount of effort and a significant amount of thought. They often extended upon examples covered in lectures and tutes or made some kind of unexpected alteration to an example we had previously dealt with. Georgy often combines various parts of the course in these questions (i.e. giving us a problem from one part of the course but framing it as something from another part). I found I performed best on these when I started 4-5 days early and had it completed at least 24-36 hours before the deadline, so I didn't have to work under the intense pressure of an encroaching deadline. They're difficult but I found them to be quite fulfilling and enjoyed the challenge they posed.

On a side note, I would highly recommend that anyone who intends to complete further study in the field (or other similar ones) use the assignments as an opportunity to practise using LaTeX. Georgy suggested this to the cohort and I found it to be a worthwhile investment (and much more pleasant to deal with than MS word).

The exam allows you to take in 10 double-sided pages to use as a reference. Like most exams that allow this (or more), you generally don't have the time to put it to good use but constructing the cheat sheet is decent revision in and of itself. Last year, the exam was supposedly very hard (there's a rumour floating around about the fail rate before scaling that I won't mention to avoid scaring prospective students away) so going into the exam, Georgy had more or less indicated that it would not be as bad. And he wasn't wrong. From a technical perspective, the exam was not particularly hard. The first question was more or less free marks. The second was a proof question. The final two were on Bilateral Trade and Information Cascades (which were topics that were only covered in the last week of the subject - meaning that they were not well practised by much of the cohort because the former didn't even feature in the tutorial from memory and the latter only briefly did. Naturally, we didn't have an assignment on them either).

As the previous review mentioned, the last three questions were quite controversial and there was quite an uproar amongst the cohort on Ed (a more modern discussion board platform that admin used in place of the OLT) in the subsequent days. The proof question was a modification to something that we had seen in an assignment, but Georgy had previously said something to the effect of 'such proofs are not suitable for the exam' in the aforementioned in-depth exam guide. This led to some confusion amongst students and many did not properly prepare for such questions. The final two almost felt shoehorned in.

I left the exam expecting to have done much worse than I ultimately ended up going. While I did answer everything (I know the first 2 questions were more or less correct), what I put down for the final two questions felt rather sketchy to me. I feel as though the exam must have been scaled or marked leniently in the end (since I don't think Georgy expected so many people to find it hard - there was no calculus/Lagrangian on the exam, for example, despite this having been a staple of the previous exams).
Like the other review, I had to dock marks for the exam and the tutorials but this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that it appears to have been scaled reasonably. Otherwise, the subject was incredibly well run and taught (even though it is definitely hard) and Georgy and Svetlana (basically the OLT) went above and beyond to answers literally hundreds of queries about the subject, tutorials, assignments (and really anything moderately relevant to the course) on Ed in a timely and extremely-helpful fashion. For anyone up for the challenge, I could not recommend the subject highly enough.

Yes, with screen capture.

Georgy Artemov

Yes. Three were available, and so was an in-depth guide explaining what exam questions for each of the topics would look like.

4.5 out of 5

Unnecessary. Lecture notes are comprehensive enough.

2 hour long lectures and 1 tutorial each week.

2018 (Sem 1).

H1 (90+)