Photo credit: The Becker Friedman Institute
In the fall of 2017, students were required to complete five homework assignments over the course of the semester. The five homework sets accounted for 25% of the course grade, each equally weighted. The first assignment was largely a review of basic probability and statistics. The rest covered the methods used by empirical economists to suss out causality. Below is a question from homework #1, covering chapter 1 in Mastering 'Metrics. Like this assignment, students were frequently asked to reproduce a table from the textbook. The Mastering 'Metrics web page provides links to data sets discussed, making their use ideal for class. For homework #1, I posted the NHIS 2009 data set to our course page as a csv file. Students were required to use the course software, SAS Studio, to reproduce the table. Stata do files for many tables are provided on the Mastering 'Metrics site, so if using Stata in your class, you will likely need to ask students to alter the tables in some way to avoid direct copying of the posted files. Reproducing tables from the book not only reviews the concepts covered, but gives students instant feedback as to their accuracy. All they need to do is look to see if their results match, or are at least close to, those in the book. As expected, students struggled with this assignment, largely because it was the first time that they completed a graded assignment using SAS. Most students were still uncomfortable with the software. Perhaps because of inexperience, many did not spend an adequate amount of time on the assignment (as noted by when the files were downloaded from the course site.) As experienced programmers know, writing a program is part knowledge of the software and part trial and error. If a mistake is made, looking at the log and revising is the next step, and may need to be repeated many times. The best way to become proficient with a software is to use it! Inexperienced programmers do not realize that it is uncommon to write a program perfectly the first time and that patience is a requirement for success. Patience is a virtue! Teaching patience and persistence is a challenge in this age of immediate satisfaction.
As will be discussed in a future post, one change that I am making to the course for the 2018 edition is adding a SAS Boot Camp at the start of the semester to provide an intense period of SAS exposure and practice prior to assigning homework sets like the one above. It is my hope that during the Boot Camp students will realize that programming takes time and assignments cannot be completed a day before they are due. Do you struggle with convincing students that assignments take time and need to be started early? How do you overcome this issue? How do you instill grit in your students? Do your students end up blaming you for their poor performance?
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AuthorFull professor of economics at a small liberal arts college in Virginia taking the leap and going textbook-less in an undergraduate econometrics course. Archives
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