Lectures
Lectures are webcasted. I attended the first lecture and skipped the rest – webcasting at 1.5x/1.75x speed from home saves you lots of time, plus you can rewind if you need to listen to an explanation again.
The first half of the mod is your standard JC Econs, just less in-depth. If you took Econs in JC and internalised the concepts, the stuff covered in lectures will (mostly) seem like common sense to you. Unlike in JC, you don’t have to write essays and all exams and online quizzes are in MCQ format, so just broadly knowing the concepts and how things work at the micro level is enough.
The second half of the mod is more challenging in that there is much more new content that you won’t see in JC, but thankfully the explanations given are pretty clear and they don’t go to in-depth. It is an intro mod after all. Don’t get complacent after 6 weeks of micro.
Tutorials
I didn’t prep at all for micro tutorials and did them on the spot in class to present (I believe some tutors call on people, but mine was content to let us volunteer – sadly not many people did and he did most of the explaining), but for macro I had to prepare for several tutorials.
The micro tutorials are super easy, but the macro tutorials are a different ball game. The upside is that once you know how to do the macro tutorials, you know you’ve got the topic down.
Joash was a great tutor, he explains stuff clearly and really tries his best to make sure students aren’t lost – I think some of my classmates didn’t have an JC Econs background (I know nothing about the difference between H1/2) and needed some extra explanation, so he slowed down and went over some points. He even sends emails responding to questions raised in class or if he has stuff he wants to add on.
Assessment
There are graded online quizzes, you have 3 attempts. Just do them and score full marks, don’t be me and click wrongly twice in a row to drop a mark. Discuss with your friends if you have to.
The midterm exam was pure micro and the final exam was 75% macro. Bell curve is gonna be pretty steep since it’s MCQ and most questions are the kind you can answer almost immediately upon reading. That said, be careful – some are tricky, especially the macro ones.
I guess the exams are all about time management and being careful once you have your content down. I forgot to bring an eraser into my midterms and we had to shade on an OAS. For finals, I realised I was too fast and slowed down, only to realise near the end I was pretty pressed for time and had to rush through some questions. Our finals was an e-exam on Examplify. Familiarise yourself with the software! I was lucky enough to have experience with it (all my exams for Year 1 and Year 2 were e-exams). Oh, and do the prescribed readings that are testable (they will specify which ones are).
Final grade: A+
Parting thoughts
How much time and effort you put in is up to you. I spent a couple of hours preparing for finals, inclusive of doing the mock exam quizzes online (useful stuff!). Don’t do that unless you’re sure that you know the content. Rewatch lecture videos if you have to. Redo tutorials. I read through the macro tutorials again to be safe.
This is an intro mod and sometimes raised way more questions than answers for me, especially for macro and theory stuff. But my tutor Joash was great and was able to let me know that those thoughts were outside of the syllabus. I’d say the key to scoring for this mod is to pay serious attention to the lectures.
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