Economics 325
Midterm 2 Info
Logistics:
The exam will be held in class (same time same place as lecture) on Thursday November
3. Make sure you are on time, as I cannot give extra time to students who arrive late.
The exam is worth 25% of your course grade.
Only simple, non-programmable calculators are allowed. No text-storing devices are
permitted. Your calculator must be (and look) non-programmable, otherwise it is a
prohibited device. No other electronic devices (including iPods, phones, etc.) are
permitted. Students must bring ID to all exams in this course.
Extra Office Hours:
I will hold my regular office hours on Monday from 10-1 in BEC 354. I will also hold
extra office hours on Wednesday from 2:00-4:00pm in BEC 354. The Wednesday hours
will be exclusively for 325 students.
Preparation:
Flipping through the notes and recalling key concepts is not sufficient preparation to pass
the exam. The way to learn this material is by working problems and thinking about
them. Each problem that I pose on a problem set should generate you several ideas of
variant problems that you can practice. The most basic example of this is if I ask you to
shift a curve up, you shift it down. With a little creativity you can go much further than
this.
I encourage you to study in groups. You might not get the intuition for something that
someone else gets. Even if one person knows the material better than another, the
process of teaching, drawing lots of pictures, and discussing intuition will be rewarding
for all. Groups of three are probably an ideal size, though two can work fine.
Coverage:
The exam will cover the material after public goods up through (and including) fiscal
federalism (which comes at the end of the set of notes entitled Education). I won’t cover
cap and trade on this exam (it will be on the final). Also, questions 5-6 in the Multiple
Choice on the practice exam were covered on Midterm 1. So a question like that is
unlikely to show up again until the final.
The optional text may be useful to help you prepare, but the notes and problem sets will
give the best sense of likely content.
Nature of the Exam:
The exam will be 60 points, which means a good student can allocate roughly 1 minute
per point to questions and still have 15 minutes at the end to review their answers. Make
sure you pace yourself so you don’t leave easy questions blank.
The exam will contain a few multiple choice questions, a couple True/False/Uncertain
questions, and a couple short answer questions. The latter two will be similar in nature to
problem sets. Naturally, the exam will be shorter than a typical problem set, because
problem sets are meant to keep you occupied for longer than 75 minutes.
A Word on Cheating:
I’ve been at UVic for a few years, and in that time I’ve sadly had to give up my naïve
prior expectation that cheating would not be a problem in Canada. I realize most students
here don’t cheat, but enough do that I will take preventative (and if necessary punitive)
measures against it. Do not be caught with scraps of paper, notes on the floor, looking at
others’ papers, or trying to communicate with others during the exam. You won’t enjoy
the treatment you receive. This is done for the sake of the majority of students who toil
honestly, only to find themselves competing for grades/jobs/positions in grad school with
a few people who took the dishonorable path of cheating.