Quarter: Fall 2001
Lecture: Tuesday, Thursday 12:30 - 1:45 p.m., Kinsey 51
Instructor: Trudy Ann Cameron, Professor of Economics
Office: Bunche 9367, (213)825-3925, or (213)825-1011
e-mail: tcameron@econ.ucla.edu
Office hours: Tuesday 2-3; Thursday 2-4; and by appointment
TA sections, office locations and hours
Other information: Discussion Board, Announcements (check announcements for updates of important information)

Course Outline

This course is an introduction to mainstream microeconomic theory and its applications. Its focus is the operation of the price system as one form of economic organization and how such a system influences society's economic activities in a largely free-market economy. The readings and lectures deal with both theoretical and policy issues.

Prerequisites: None

Organization: Each week, you will be expected to attend two lectures (as above) and one quiz section (various times). Sections will begin immediately, even prior to the first lecture. There will be one midterm examination and a final examination. The midterm exam will count as 25% of your course grade and the final will count as 50% of your course grade. (You must take the final in order to obtain a passing grade in the course.) The remaining 25% will be determined on the basis of your performance in your quiz section. Of these 25 percentage points, 20 percentage points will be based on the best four out of five of a mix of quizzes and homeworks, and 5 percentage points will be based on a your experience with a non-market valuation survey currently under way at UCLA. You may choose either to participate in this study, or merely to view it, but there will be a course requirement related to its content and the economic issues and research that underlie the project. The study concerns some of the material in the textbook in chapters 10 and 11. Each T.A. will instruct you as to the required exercises for his or her section. Important course-wide dates and times are:
 

**** ALL EXAMINATIONS WILL BE TAKEN AT THE SCHEDULED TIME ****. Since you already know the exact dates and times of the examinations in this course, you will be able to plan your study time well in advance to accommodate examinations in other courses and any travel plans. No one will be permitted to take an exam BEFORE the scheduled time. The only exceptions for later make-up examinations will be for serious illness of the student or a death in the student's immediate family. For fairness to other students, official written documentation must be produced for any exceptions.

Examinations will be returned in quiz sections or will be available from your quiz section instructor. By the time the midterm is graded, we expect to be posting exam grades and quiz section grades at the MyGradebook link associated with this course at MyUCLA. You should check this site during the second part of the quarter to make sure that we have all of your grades recorded and that the recorded scores agree with your documents. Please save all graded materials until after final grades are posted for the course and you are confident that the data posted at MyGradebook are consistent with your records.
 

Readings: The main text for the course is:

Mankiw, N. Gregory (2001) PRINCIPLES OF MICROECONOMICS, Second Edition, New York: Harcourt College Publishers.

Harris, Robert B. (2001) Study Guide to accompany Mankiw's Principles of Microeconomics, New York: Harcourt College Publishers. [Assumed; I still have not received my copy. Student sets are supposed to come in "bundled" form.]

Lecture Notes: At the time this syllabus was prepared, current lecture notes are NOT expected to be available from ASUCLA. They may elect to recycle old notes. If you miss a lecture, be sure to contact someone who did attend the class to ensure that you have not missed any recent announcements. My lecture scripts from the last time I taught the course (Winter 2000) are still available via the CONTENTS button on the Web at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/ssc/labs/cameron/e1w00. This year's lecture material will evolve from prior lectures. I will generally try to post F'01 lecture scripts by the afternoon of the day following the lecture.

Reserve Materials: Powell Library has available (without keys) a fairly wide selection of midterms and finals from prior versions of the course. Most of these are now available online. (At the time this syllabus was being prepared, the library was still in the process of uploading old exam files to their "Electronic Reserves and Course Materials" link. Note that I did not teach Econ 1 during the 1996-97 academic year, or during the 2000-01 academic year.)

Tentative Course Outline: I have not assigned topics to particular lecture days. We will plan to cover all chapters of the textbook, in order, except for Chapters 9 and 12. I do plan to have you cover the material in Chapter 21.

Online Quizzes: We will offer occasional online quiz-taking opportunities. In general, these will not be for credit, because quiz-taker identities cannot be verified with sufficient reliability. Most of the quizzes will be multiple choice with automatic on-line grading (and regrading). No record of your performance on these quizzes will be retained. Taking these quizzes is entirely a transaction between you and the quiz program. When you get an answer right, you are provided with the rationale for why that answer is correct and others are incorrect. A percentage grade is reported, along with a standard verbal evaluation for that grade. You may revise and resubmit your quiz answers as many times as necessary--preferably until you get them all right.

Ground Rules, Dire Warnings, Earnest Requests: Because of the large large size of this class, certain ground rules must be understood for its smooth functioning. PLEASE READ THESE RULES CAREFULLY.

a.) Attendance at quiz section is required, since section work counts for 25% of your course grade. (Each quarter, two or three people fail to attend quiz sections and claim that they did not know that quiz sections were required. Now you know.)

b.) Anyone who does attend a class meeting will conduct him or herself appropriately.

c.) All exams will be taken when scheduled except as noted above.

d.) Anyone discovered cheating on any examination will be prosecuted in accordance with university regulations. The teaching assistants and the professor will pursue all avenues permitted by university regulation to punish those caught cheating.

e.) A pass/no pass student will take all examinations.

f.) If possible, students are requested to consult their quiz section instructor about questions and/or problems before coming to the professor, but should feel welcome to consult with the professor as well. Please observe office hours if you can.

g.) The record of a student will neither be falsified nor given special evaluation because of the student's "need" for a particular grade or because of any other consideration. We will not second-guess what you meant to say on exams; what you actually write down is all that counts. There will be no post-course individual exercises or opportunities to raise grades. The weights assigned to the midterm and final exams will not be altered individually (except in rare cases when the midterm is missed for the admissible reasons listed above). The grade of Incomplete will be issued only for legitimate inability to take the final examination. (Simply the fear that you are not going to get a good enough grade in the course is expressly not an acceptable justification for granting an Incomplete. No petition to receive an Incomplete or to drop the course will be accepted during or after the final exam.)

Warning #1: Do not look for a vast amount of special attention just before the midterm or final exam if you have not bothered to attend lectures, discussions, or office hours. If you are conscientious about your responsibilities in the learning process, however, we will be enthusiastic about helping you.

Warning #2: (Especially for first-quarter freshmen.) While you may have found it easy to attain top grades with little effort before, so did all the people now sitting around you. The stakes are now much higher, and it is important to realize this early. While the relative distribution of A's, B's and C's in this course has traditionally followed a rough "curve," I generally draw the line as follows: If you cannot accumulate an overall percentage score of at least 40% in the coursework, you are very unlikely to pass. (Many would agree that at least 40% of the material in Economics 1 requires no more than common sense.)

Warning #3: If you find yourself losing your grip on the course material, seek help as soon as possible. The first few lectures in Economics 1 are indeed just a formalization of simple common sense. This gentle beginning can lull some students into a dangerous sense of complacency. The size of the class makes it difficult for us to single out earnest students who are not keeping up. You must take the initiative. You will sink or swim based on the objective criteria provided by exams, quizzes, and problem sets. To ensure regularity in examination grading, the same quiz instructor will grade each section on the two class-wide common exams. (Quiz section scores will also be scaled so that the scores for all TAs have the same means.) Thus, only a small proportion of your exam grade is determined by someone who actually knows you personally. We therefore cannot, and will not, factor in anything else we know about you in second-guessing what you meant to say in answering any question. Consequently, if you find that some of the relevant skills for the course are rusty or missing in your case, you will have to be particularly attentive to your progress right from the beginning of the course. We are unlikely to be able to come to you to inform you personally that you need to do some extra remedial work. Seek help early and often. Hunt up a tutor if you need one. We will not compromise our grading policy based on the identity of any student; grades will be based solely on performance in this course.

Warning #4: Numerous empirical studies of students taking introductory microeconomics courses have show than prior GPA is one of the best predictors of success with the course material. This is because the subject draws heavily on a wide set of academic skills that also tend to be captured by a student's GPA in conventional academic subjects. Also note that this is a course in Principles, not a Survey or Topics course, and as such must cover a basic set of widely accepted fundamental analytical techniques in a finite period of time. Based on some minimal assumptions about typical human behavior, we explore a set of simple but powerful graphical models. Regardless of your ideology, these analytical techniques can be applied creatively to a wide range of topics. Some of these topics may be highly unconventional and provocative, but first the basic techniques must be understood and mastered. For that task, ideology is to be avoided. The goal is comprehension of a set of very useful tools. What you do with them once you know how to use them correctly and safely is up to you.

Request #1: If, in your opinion, there is anything offensive about the course or the course materials, it is your responsibility to bring this to MY attention promptly. I will do everything within reason to make the lecture and course environment hospitable to all who wish to participate.

Request #2: Be an active consumer of your education. If you have any recommendations for the conduct of the course, the subject matter, the TAs, the exams, or anything else, it makes little sense to save your criticisms or suggestions for the teaching evaluation forms on the last day of class. Make these points while there is still time to do something about it. (Likewise, if things are going well, positive reinforcement will help them continue to go well. Anonymous notes are fine.)

[last modified: 9/24/2001]