A big theme in economics is minimizing cost and maximizing gain. That applies to its study. It isn’t how much time you spend studying that is so important as when you study and how organized you are when you study. Spending a few minutes preparing for lecture by trying the next hw exercises, spending a few minutes after lecture to put ideas together, note specific questions, tie up loose ends and doing exercises while what you learned from lecture is still fresh is much more efficient than trying to do hws from a cold start. You will spend less total time, experience less stress and get better grades. If you go to lecture and section not prepared, not primed, you will be bored, restless and inattentive, which will make lecture and section a big waste of time. This will get worse and worse if you start falling behind, because economics is cumulative: If you don’t learn the initial stuff well, you can’t learn the later stuff well.
Lectures will give a familiarity with the issues, but you won’t be able to solve problems on exams by just attending lectures. It’s only through doing home works largely on your own that you develop problem solving ability. Talking to your classmates—after you had made a good effort—helps to learn short cuts. You have to try problems on your own first because you have to take the “long cut” before you can recognize a short cut. See me whenever you don’t quite understand what you did wrong. That could be sign that you are missing something important.
Start by going through the introduction, examples and especially, the graphs of the relevant chapter. That way, your mind will be primed when you read or attend. If readings aren’t listed, try to think through the issues that the prof. is going to discuss. Don’t just sit there and “take it in”. The empty vessel model of learning doesn’t work for mathematical subjects. Learning mathematical subjects is more like learning how to ride a bike or swim. There is no substitute for doing it.
Lecture can be interesting if you are interested. You become interested by pre-reading and by trying the exercises. By starting exercises early before you have read everything, you will be practicing problem solving and “thinking” about economic problems as opposed to regurgitating. That makes economics much more interesting. You will also be practicing being calm and resourceful when confronted with an unfamiliar problem—very useful when you are presented with unfamiliar problems on tests. This doesn’t need to be agonizing (<30) min since you are starting so early.
Make listening to lecture an active experience by verbally labeling each part of a graph or equation with its name. If you can’t name it, ask the prof. Then try to figure out the intuitive reason for the conclusion of the algebra or graph. You have to be well prepared in order to be able to do this effectively and without being a pain to the prof. But, the gain is that you will be sure that you understand the lecture. I have seen people, albeit bright people, acing home works and exams doing only this and never studying.
When you read, you can keep your concentration up by converting conclusions of sections into questions and writing them in the margins. You can use these later for exam preparation. If you are good, you can also try to guess what will be said based on the intro sentences and graphs. Note troubling issues as you read. Then ask the prof during lecture. Lecture is best when it is a private tutorial on what you didn’t understand. (Furthermore, if you have been diligent, this is an opportunity for the prof to know how brilliant and curious you are for the purposes of recommending you!) If you are really good, you can play a game of guessing what the prof will say and correcting him when he is sloppy.
Lecture is largely a waste of time when it is on something that you are not in a position to understand, in which case, you are little better off than being at home sleeping. Sit close to the lecturer and away from people you are likely to chat with.
After lecture, as you are walking to your next class, try to mentally organize the main points discussed. This will take 10 minutes but it will help prevent what you have learned from flying away. If you don’t pin down loose ends, things will unravel and it will cost you even more time later.
Within 2 hrs after lecture try the exercises again—without rereading (<1 hrs). If you can’t do it, mark the questions you had trouble with—these questions will also be useful for exam prep—and then read more.
Time hrs |
Before Lecture: |
|
1/2 |
Pre-read text, list questions |
|
1/2 |
Try exercises, note difficulties |
|
|
Ask questions, guess at lecture |
|
|
After lecture |
|
10 minutes |
Organize main ideas of lecture, step back and get big picture |
|
1/4 |
Fill in gaps in notes |
|
1 |
Try exercises again |
|
1 |
Read text |
|
4 hrs |
Total |
It isn’t necessary to do this for every lecture and you have to adapt it to your own needs, but the main idea is to do things efficiently.
At some point, you will want to meet up with your classmates to compare your solutions.
You don’t want to be spending a lot of time reviewing midterm material when you should be studying for the finals. It is really helpful for your understanding and for finals preparation to make a “cheat sheet” of the midterm material, after you have done the midterm and had a chance to think about and look up what you missed. The best way to compose a cheat sheet is to first try to organize the material in your head, without paper. Talking about it with someone could help. Then, after you have a paperless understanding, write it down and fill out the details, and note the ambiguities. Bring these ambiguities to office hours.
Study groups can be very helpful in developing problem solving skills. Instead of reading or asking the prof, which is passive, when you have a problem on which you are stuck, you can talk to someone in whom you do not have total confidence, and hence, whose reasoning you will want to check on your own. Doing that, you will be practicing analytic skills because meeting in a study group AFTER you have tried hws on your own:
1) Forces you to verbalize your understanding or lack thereof, thus helps to dispel your possible illusions about whether you really know the material. The right understanding is unique. Misunderstandings are infinite. Odds are, your misunderstandings will differ from others misunderstandings. Discussing your misunderstanding makes your misunderstanding evident before the exam.
2) You can also get nifty tricks and short cuts from solving problems together.
3) Discussing topics or problems make them more interesting.
The best study partner is not necessarily the best student. Having someone who knows much more than you in a study group will encourage you to slack off while it encourages them to take even more initiative. In my experience, uneven study groups makes the better students even better and the weak student even worse. The most helpful study groups are ones where everyone is about evenly matched.
However study groups can also be a giant waste of time. Plan your study groups. Have a specific agenda before you meet and most importantly, a specific deadline on when it will end. 2-3 people is ideal. 5 or above means that some people will not do any work, which wastes those people’s time.
How much effort people put into something is often a function of how worried they are about it. However, this strategy isn’t that effective in mathy fields because: pre-exam anxiety is a function of, 1) what you know compared to 2) what you don’t know. Pre-exam anxiety is not a function of what you don’t know you don’t know.
Preparing for 121 Final
Dr. Friedland covered chp 1-14. The appendices get more technical than you need, but they may help clarify ideas, if you are mathematically orientated in your understanding. He was quite selective in his material. He touched on most everything else in the rest of the book or covered things that were complementary, eg, numerical or other example for something in the book, or he used a slightly different approach. You should use the text to fill in the gaps in your understanding of lecture and not read it without a specific issue in mind, eg, for something that you in particular did not understand in lecture. You can see that it is difficult to say exactly what you need to cover in the text since that would vary from person to person. Of the things he didn’t quite cover in lecture were Salop’s model of product differentiation. He focused on the Hotelling model.
If you are looking for a preparation strategy, and you plan to start today, I recommend the following strategy to pinpoint what you really need to know and focus all of your energy on those things.
Redo everything you got wrong in your hws and actual exams, and do each question in at least 2 ways ,eg, algebraically and then graphically, or algebraically and intuitively…—without the solution key near by. See my suggestions on doing well for details on these 3 ways.
Meet with friends to discuss your answers. You want to see if you can explain your answers to each other. This will show whether you really understand what you think your understand. You can also share tips, short cuts and insights
Only when you agree, go off on your own and look at the solution key. Collect residual questions and meet again. (You may want to check out my suggestions on study groups.)
With those residual questions, go back through your lecture notes, my section notes and the text if necessary. Collect the residual questions and come to my office hours or the review sections. It would be best to send them to me before hand so I can think about the best way to explain.
I have written out very detailed explanations about things that I believed were difficult and important from home works and lectures in my section notes.
I have included fully worked solutions to examples in my notes. I recommend you do those problems without looking at what I wrote and treat them as exercises, following steps #1-3.
Notice also that I have derived general formulas for many concepts, eg, for 2nd degree price discrimination, Cournot competition for N firms.…Hotelling’s models so that you can pick your own numbers, do the derivations and use the formulas to check your answers.
I would focus on material after the midterm, though you should definitely clear up confusion about material from before midterm as they arise from trying to understand material after the midterm.
From every exercise, previous exam or lecture notes, note carefully every question that you got wrong or had trouble with. By exam time, you should have a list of issues in the form of questions and hw problems that were particularly difficult for you. From these you can construct your own exam. This exam should be much better than any past exam because it contains your particular weak points. By reviewing from these questions, you aren’t wasting time on things that you already know well enough.
You want focus on these and hence, minimizing what you have to read, maximizing independent thought. If you still don’t understand, go talk to a classmate who may give you hints but not the answers. If you have solution keys for practice exams, do not look at them until you have given the question a good try! Or you will become a solution key addict. If you are still stuck after thinking about the problem on your own and discussing it with your friends, check the answer. If you have further questions ask questions during lecture or at the section or come to office hours.
Anumber of my best students have redone old exams a number of times, getting something different wrong in each trial.
You don’t want to be spending a lot of time reviewing midterm material when you should be studying for the finals. It is really helpful for your understanding and for finals preparation to make a “cheat sheet” of the midterm material, after you have done the midterm and had a chance to think about and look up what you missed.
You can’t concentrate if your life is in a mess—emotional or otherwise--, if you haven’t slept properly, if you haven’t eaten, if you aren’t healthy, or even if you are involved in some torrid affair. Being organized with the rest of your time helps every class you take. Take time to exercise and get out stress. You will concentrate better and sleep better. You can reduce the time for sleep by 1-2hrs if you sleep at the same time everyday. A good book on how to organize your time and get good study skills “How to Study in College” by Paul Pauk—$5 at Amazon.
One of the things I hear from my former students who have graduated is that they wished they had spent more time on academics while at UCD. Having a job or jobs adds a lot of stress and takes more time than you might think given that there are only a certain number of useable hours in a day and you have to eat, commute and recover from job related issues. Your tradeoff is rational if you take into account the total stream of income over your entire lifetime that you would be forgoing in taking time away from your studies now. I would imagine that lowering your GPA from a 3.7 or a 3.5 is going to be worth much more than anything you can earn now, especially in a world with global competition, where you will be competing against Indian and Chinese students.
Globalization is going to make your world quite different from your parents. Odds are, you are going to be poorer. Here are some articles to help you get a sense of the true cost of leisure and part time work while in college:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_is_Flat
An article on recent research how money affects happiness:
If you plan to do research, you have to acquire a love for the elegance and beauty of the subject. You need to spend a little time reflecting on the unity of ideas that you have learned. In the process, you will come up with interesting questions, which it will be good for you to discuss with the prof during office hours, showing your curiosity, and for which he can later give you a recommendation.
Economics is about people and their interactions. One of the best ways to learn economics and prepare for research is to use it. And a good way of using it is to discuss economic issues with friends or in blogs. Good sites:
econphd.net (grad school advice from people who succeeded and those who did not)
http://www.economist.com/index.html (full access from UC library site)
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/