ECON 5
Introductory Economics
Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Introduction to models and tools used by economists in practical real-world context. Study of important topical issues such as inequality, health care, and environmental policies. Students learn about available data sources and become better equipped to understand current events. May not be used to fulfill entrance requirements for any Economics Department major. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 5.0
Units: 5.0
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2021 - I'm gonna try to be as objective and fair as possible in writing this review because I don't want to only let my own personal opinion fuel this review. But in all short honesty, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. heres why: Like everyone else, i took this class based on its past reviews thinking it was gonna be an easy A and a fun time. As a stem major, i also wanted to take an econ class to learn more about the subject out of curiosity and exploration of interests. This class has since killed that curiosity. The idea behind this class is good in concept but not in practice. It's pretty much "designed" to be an introductory economics course where people who are not necessarily econ majors can dip their toes in the water and get a taste of the subject to see maybe if it's something they enjoy. This goal sounds pretty good and is why I wanted to take this class and also because it carried a GE I needed. But in reality this did not work out. This class was WAYYYY too information dense for students to be able to adequately learn. It's like they took every single topic from economics and threw it at your face over the span of 10 weeks BUT they only give you a surface level introduction to each topic which makes it super hard to understand the underlying concept since you are not given any context or deeper explanation. The end result is a CRAP ton of vocab words and definitions that are very jargon-y by nature and impossible to truly understand on your own. The class ends up also feeling VERY fast paced (even if the workload itself is relatively light) because you're essentially learning 2 whole units per week. Now maybe this wouldn't be so bad if the professor was adequate at teaching. (Before I brutally criticize this professor I do want to make a disclaimer and say that as a person, she seems very kind and nice. In fact, I'm quite surprised that she chose to conduct the class in this way to the point where everyone is upset with her because I truly do not believe she is intentionally malicious in the way she does things. I'm not sure why things ended up getting this bad to be honest.) But the way the professor ended up conducting the lectures and class failed miserably. Her lectures were unfortunately unclear and not succinct at all. She basically read off the slides and did a poor job narrating/explaining the concepts. Since most of the concepts were already brand new to a lot of us, this made learning a whole lot harder. None of it was engaging at all. That all being said, I haven't even addressed the worst part of the class yet: the weekly quizzes, the group writing assignment, and her response to student concerns. Each week we would take a quiz on the lecture material that was about 8 questions long and each was worth 5% of our grade for a total of 45% of our grade. The quizzes were horrendous. They were poor representations of the material we learned and she always put questions that referred to a SPECIFIC number value from one of the MANY graphs/infographics during lecture. Oh, and she didn't provide the graph on the quiz so we either had to go back and look for it in the lecture OR i guess she just expected us to remember all the statistical facts she dumped on us from the material :) Not only that but almost every single question was worded vaguely and horribly. She would say things like "based on the graph below..." but then all the answers were things that were NOT based on the graph below and instead were from the lecture. Several times she also worded things so vaguely I had no idea what she was asking for. In short, it was terrible. For the quizzes to be such a huge portion of our grade, they were extremely unreasonable and unnecessarily difficult. One of the most disappointing parts is when SO many students emailed and complained to her about the quizzes and how the way things were currently being done was NOT working. The professor responded by basically disregarding everyone's concerns and saying that if we needed help we could go to office hours. But such a deep rooted issue in the structure of the class wasn't something that the STUDENTS could solve themselves by going to office hours. If there was to be change made it would have needed to be from the instructor's side. Long story short: she didn't change a thing, the quizzes got even worse, and every one's grades continued being tanked. I'm normally pretty reasonable in my judgement against professors; if I see effort being made on their part that shows that they are genuinely trying and caring for their students then that's enough for me even if they aren't the best lecturers or whatever. But the unwillingness of the professor to listen to students in this course was pretty unacceptable to me. In the midst of a pandemic, out of all the professors I've had, she is the ONLY one who gave absolutely no regard to students' wellbeing and their concerns and honestly I'm baffled that she chose to do this that way. If over half the students hate your course that is nobody's fault but the professors, end of story. And as if things couldn't get any worse, the group writing assignment was yet another example of how this course failed miserably. It was another huge chunk of our grade and yet she provided virtually NO instruction on how to do it. All there was was a pdf of "instructions" that was posted and a deadline to submit. The rest was left to us. Keep in mind, we are all REMOTE and it's extremely difficult to coordinate and work together as a group in a virtual learning environment so I have no idea why she chose to do a GROUP assignment any way. On top of that, she chose to grade pretty harshly given the circumstances and when she released scores she had the audacity to say in an email that the reason people scored low was because they "didn't collaborate" enough. Like what did you expect from a group of strangers who are currently living hundreds of miles away from each other and trying to learn virtually online? I was gonna wait until after the final to write this review but this was the last straw for me, and a lot of other people. I will update this review after the final but as of right now, this was supposed to be my easiest class and now it's pretty much inevitable that this will be the class that's gonna ruin my 4.0. Highly, HIGHLY do not recommend this class. Honestly, I see a lot of potential in this class if change is implemented because the topics we learn about seem very relevant to our current society and interesting to learn about but unfortunately my experience (and that of many others as well I believe) was nothing short of terrible. Update: the final was slightly easier than the weekly quizzes but not by much. I tried very hard and got a B+ she either curved the class or rounded me because I ended up with an A- in the class. Not the worst but still annoying because this class should have been an easy A and not the class that ruined my 4.0
Winter 2021 - I'm gonna try to be as objective and fair as possible in writing this review because I don't want to only let my own personal opinion fuel this review. But in all short honesty, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. heres why: Like everyone else, i took this class based on its past reviews thinking it was gonna be an easy A and a fun time. As a stem major, i also wanted to take an econ class to learn more about the subject out of curiosity and exploration of interests. This class has since killed that curiosity. The idea behind this class is good in concept but not in practice. It's pretty much "designed" to be an introductory economics course where people who are not necessarily econ majors can dip their toes in the water and get a taste of the subject to see maybe if it's something they enjoy. This goal sounds pretty good and is why I wanted to take this class and also because it carried a GE I needed. But in reality this did not work out. This class was WAYYYY too information dense for students to be able to adequately learn. It's like they took every single topic from economics and threw it at your face over the span of 10 weeks BUT they only give you a surface level introduction to each topic which makes it super hard to understand the underlying concept since you are not given any context or deeper explanation. The end result is a CRAP ton of vocab words and definitions that are very jargon-y by nature and impossible to truly understand on your own. The class ends up also feeling VERY fast paced (even if the workload itself is relatively light) because you're essentially learning 2 whole units per week. Now maybe this wouldn't be so bad if the professor was adequate at teaching. (Before I brutally criticize this professor I do want to make a disclaimer and say that as a person, she seems very kind and nice. In fact, I'm quite surprised that she chose to conduct the class in this way to the point where everyone is upset with her because I truly do not believe she is intentionally malicious in the way she does things. I'm not sure why things ended up getting this bad to be honest.) But the way the professor ended up conducting the lectures and class failed miserably. Her lectures were unfortunately unclear and not succinct at all. She basically read off the slides and did a poor job narrating/explaining the concepts. Since most of the concepts were already brand new to a lot of us, this made learning a whole lot harder. None of it was engaging at all. That all being said, I haven't even addressed the worst part of the class yet: the weekly quizzes, the group writing assignment, and her response to student concerns. Each week we would take a quiz on the lecture material that was about 8 questions long and each was worth 5% of our grade for a total of 45% of our grade. The quizzes were horrendous. They were poor representations of the material we learned and she always put questions that referred to a SPECIFIC number value from one of the MANY graphs/infographics during lecture. Oh, and she didn't provide the graph on the quiz so we either had to go back and look for it in the lecture OR i guess she just expected us to remember all the statistical facts she dumped on us from the material :) Not only that but almost every single question was worded vaguely and horribly. She would say things like "based on the graph below..." but then all the answers were things that were NOT based on the graph below and instead were from the lecture. Several times she also worded things so vaguely I had no idea what she was asking for. In short, it was terrible. For the quizzes to be such a huge portion of our grade, they were extremely unreasonable and unnecessarily difficult. One of the most disappointing parts is when SO many students emailed and complained to her about the quizzes and how the way things were currently being done was NOT working. The professor responded by basically disregarding everyone's concerns and saying that if we needed help we could go to office hours. But such a deep rooted issue in the structure of the class wasn't something that the STUDENTS could solve themselves by going to office hours. If there was to be change made it would have needed to be from the instructor's side. Long story short: she didn't change a thing, the quizzes got even worse, and every one's grades continued being tanked. I'm normally pretty reasonable in my judgement against professors; if I see effort being made on their part that shows that they are genuinely trying and caring for their students then that's enough for me even if they aren't the best lecturers or whatever. But the unwillingness of the professor to listen to students in this course was pretty unacceptable to me. In the midst of a pandemic, out of all the professors I've had, she is the ONLY one who gave absolutely no regard to students' wellbeing and their concerns and honestly I'm baffled that she chose to do this that way. If over half the students hate your course that is nobody's fault but the professors, end of story. And as if things couldn't get any worse, the group writing assignment was yet another example of how this course failed miserably. It was another huge chunk of our grade and yet she provided virtually NO instruction on how to do it. All there was was a pdf of "instructions" that was posted and a deadline to submit. The rest was left to us. Keep in mind, we are all REMOTE and it's extremely difficult to coordinate and work together as a group in a virtual learning environment so I have no idea why she chose to do a GROUP assignment any way. On top of that, she chose to grade pretty harshly given the circumstances and when she released scores she had the audacity to say in an email that the reason people scored low was because they "didn't collaborate" enough. Like what did you expect from a group of strangers who are currently living hundreds of miles away from each other and trying to learn virtually online? I was gonna wait until after the final to write this review but this was the last straw for me, and a lot of other people. I will update this review after the final but as of right now, this was supposed to be my easiest class and now it's pretty much inevitable that this will be the class that's gonna ruin my 4.0. Highly, HIGHLY do not recommend this class. Honestly, I see a lot of potential in this class if change is implemented because the topics we learn about seem very relevant to our current society and interesting to learn about but unfortunately my experience (and that of many others as well I believe) was nothing short of terrible. Update: the final was slightly easier than the weekly quizzes but not by much. I tried very hard and got a B+ she either curved the class or rounded me because I ended up with an A- in the class. Not the worst but still annoying because this class should have been an easy A and not the class that ruined my 4.0
Most Helpful Review
i took him for econ 1,2, and 11 just got on here to comment on the person who said that Sproul is never around to answer question. Well he gives you his cellphone number on the first day, and answers if you call... just memorize his notes, the questions r word by word off his lecture just with different numbers(small simple numbers)
i took him for econ 1,2, and 11 just got on here to comment on the person who said that Sproul is never around to answer question. Well he gives you his cellphone number on the first day, and answers if you call... just memorize his notes, the questions r word by word off his lecture just with different numbers(small simple numbers)
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