Blogging Has Been Light

Blogging's been light lately for a couple of reasons (and probably will continue to be for a while). School just started up at Unknown University and anyone in academia knows that the beginning of the semester is always crazy. In addition, I have THREE preps this fall (I typically have two preps, but one of the faculty went on sabbatical, and I got his class - a new prep).

Most important, I've come to the conclusion that I have to focus more on my research. I have a number of project that are "close" to completion, but it's better to have ONE completed and submitted than THREE that are "close". So, for the fall semester, I'm trying to work on only one project at at time until it (or at least my part of it) is done. I've tried to "juggle" projects in the past, but that ends up with me spinning my wheels. For me, multitasking just doesn't work.

To give you an idea as to what's on my plate:

• I just finished a paper to submit to the Eastern Finance Association annual meeting - it's a regional conference, but i go more often than not, since I have a lot of friends in the association. The deadline is today (in about an hour), but it's done and submitted. Now we let it sit for a week and then give it another go-round.
• Next on the line is a couple of days' work on a paper that's being presented at the FMA meeting in about a month's time. All I have to do is write up a short section of the lit review, so it should be done by Friday.
• Then I put in about a week's work on a third paper. I've done most of the empirical analysis except for one part. Once done, this goes to my coauthor who does the writeup.
• While I'm waiting for one or the other of these things to come back to me, I work on creating a data set for another paper.
  

Somewhere in there, I'll be juggling three separate classes. Interestingly enough, one is a "practicum" (the student-managed fund, one is a case class (advanced corporate finance), and the third is a straight lecture course (fixed income and credit markets). Since each class demands a different teaching style, this semester could get interesting (and possibly the beginning of a good case of multiple personality disorder).

In fact, I have some students who are taking all three classes with me, so we'll either end up on very good or very bad terms by December. Either way, it should be interesting.

Conference Presentations By the Numbers

Once you've gone to a half dozen academic presentations, you begin to notece the same comments appearing over and over. Along those lines, here's a classic piece from George Stigler's in the 1977 Journal of Political Economy — “The Conference Handbook.” Stigler suggested that econ seminar participants could speed things up by making objections to the speaker's presentation using the following numbered list:

1. Adam Smith said that.
2. Unfortunately, there is an identification problem which is not dealt with adequately in the paper.
3. The residuals are clearly non-normal, and the specification of the model is incorrect.
4. Theorizing is not fruitful at this stage; we need a series of case studies.
5. Case studies are a clue, but no real progress can be made until a model of the process is constructed.
6. The second-best consideration would, of course, vitiate the argument.
7. That is an index number problem (obs., except in Cambridge).
8. Have you tried two-stage least squares?
9. The conclusions change if you introduce uncertainty.
10. You didn’t use probit analysis?
11. I proved the main results in a paper published years ago.
12. The analysis is marred by a failure to distinguish transitory and permanent components.
13. The market cannot, of course, deal satisfactorily with that externality.
14. But what if transaction costs are not zero?
15. That follows from the Coase Theorem.
16. Of course, if you allow for the investment in human capital, the entire picture changes.
17. Of course, the demand function is quite inelastic.
18. Of course, the supply function is highly inelastic.
19. The author uses a sledgehammer to crack a peanut.
20. What empirical finding would contradict your theory?
21. The central argument is not only a tautology, it is false.
22. What happens when you extend the analysis to the later (or earlier) period?
23. The motivation of the agents in this theory is so narrowly egotistic that it cannot possibly explain the behavior of real people.
24. The flabby economic actor in this impressionistic model should be replaced by the utility-maximizing individual.
25. Did you have any trouble in inverting the singular matrix?
26. It is unfortunate that the wrong choice was made between M1 and M2.
27. That is alright in theory, but it doesn’t work out in practice (use sparingly).
28. The speaker apparently believes that there is still one free lunch.
29. The problem cannot be dealt with by partial equilibrium methods; it requires a general equilibrium formulation.
30. The paper is rigidly confined by the paradigm of neoclassical economics, so large parts of urgent reality are outside its comprehension.
31. The conclusion rests on the assumption of fixed tastes, but (of course) tastes have surely changed.
32. The trouble with the present situation is that the property rights have not been fully assigned.

HT: The Freakonomics blog.

Some of the commenters on the piece added more options. Here are some of the better ones:

1. How did you handle endogeneity problem?” (Note: this almost always works well at finance conferences, particularly for corporate finance pieces)
2. Your standard errors are too small because you failed to cluster (or clustered at the improper level).
3. At Fed banks, certainly one of the items for this list would be, “How is this of any relevance to monetary policy?”
4. The results are driven by unobserved heterogeneity.
5. Did you try using a Difference-in-Difference technique? Did you try using a non-parametric estimation?
6. Experiments conducted by Kahnmen and Tversky have clearly demonstrated that people do NOT choose rationally under those conditions.
7. Is there a weak instruments problem?
8. But what if the actors aren’t rational?
9. Isn’t this just Modigliani-Miller?
   
10. How is your model identified?
11. Have you included fixed effects?
12. That’s ok in practice, but it won’t work in theory.
13. This theory is only valid in the static case and won’t work in the dynamic one.
14. Why do we care about this? or “Why is this question important anyway?"
15. That’s true, but not very interesting
16. That’s not a large effect you’ve found, it’s a small effect.
17. That’s not a small effect you’ve dismissed, it’s a large effect.
18. Did you try first-differencing?
19. What happens if you estimate it by GMM?
20. You just ran a bunch of regressions. What have we learned from your analysis?
21. Here's a popular one, in the “I did this back in..” vein:“I was troubled that you didn’t cite my work in the field.”
22. Your empirical results are obviously biased by a troubling sample selection issue.
23. But what if we view this as a 2-stage game?.
24. ‘In an efficient market, that type of arbitrage isn’t possible’.
25. I believe your correlation is a spurious one unless you convince me you checked for co-integration.

If you can think of others to add to the list, feel free to put them in the comments section.

Advice From A Journal Editor

Here's a very interesting and informative piece titled "Edifying Editing" by R. Preston McAfee (former co-editor of AER and editor of Economic Inquiry). It's not entirely applicable to finance because he's an econ guy. But there is a great deal of similarity between the fields. Here are a few things that stuck with me:

1. He cites a paper by Dan Hamermesh (1994), who discovered that, conditional on not receiving a report in 3 months, the expected waiting time was a year. So, if you want to endear yourself to editors and you're a reviewer, get stuff done quickly. I know that the longer I wait on a referee report, the less I feel like punching it out.
2. Around 25% of the to AER during his tenure were rejected due to poor execution. That is, the paper represented a good start on an article worthy topic, but provided too little for the audience. I recently was discussing a former student (and current coauthor) with a friend of mine who edits a pretty good journal. His comment was that my friend does good work, but "needs to finish his papers". Unfortunately, my friend often sends papers out to journals to get feedback from referees. That's what colleagues are for.
   
3. He feels like a a surprising number of papers provide no meaningful conclusion. Don;t merely reiterate your introduction in the conclusion. The introduction is to motivate a problem and summarize your results, and the conclusion is your opportunity to tie things together and make some parting shots.
4. He feels that submitting a paper where the editor has deep expertise usually produces a higher bar but less variance in the evaluation.
   

All in all a very worthwhile read. So read it here.

HT: Marginal Revolution

Things You Wish You Could Write On Students' Papers

Here's a pretty good list of things I wish I could write on some students' papers, from Sapience Speaks. #6, while harsh even for this list, is my favorite. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

1. "You certainly have a way with words. A long, long way."
2. "You seem to be attempting a very delicate approach to the assignment--so delicate, in fact, that you fail to touch on it at all."
3. "Every one of the words in this sentence is utterly devoid of meaning."
4. "I can't help feeling that you treat the ideas in your paper much as a black hole treats its neighboring star systems: forcefully and vigorously synthesizing them, you condense them beyond recognition, leading to utter destruction and chaos."
5. "like the broad swift stream / a thesaurus will go far / but yields no great depth."
6. "This paper isn't even bulls*&t. Bulls*&t has substance. This is diarrhea."
7. "I find your rhetorical strategy in this expository to be similar to that of a rhinoceros in extracting a tooth: large, blunt, and wholly ineffective."
8. "This entire page says exactly NOTHING."
9. "Every teacher wishes she could read a paper like this one. It makes the rest of her life so much brighter by contrast."
10. "As I was reading, I felt that you were trying to include in your paper every type of fallacy possible. If so, you only missed one."
11. "The level of disorganization in your paper suggests that your true topic must be chaos theory, not, as your title implied, Wordsworth."
12. "the wind speaks all day / yet with only empty breath: / you have no thesis"
13. "I'm not sure even you believe this sentence."

What Effect Does Professor Quality Have on Student Performance?

Whether or not (and how) professor quality affects student performance is an ongoing question in academia. Unfortunately, there are a lot of statistical problems involved in testing these effects. Here are a couple:

• Students self-select into professors classes. So, better students might choose to take harder professor, while weaker ones might choose "softball" ones. Or alternately, grade-conscious students might select into classes of "easy graders"
  
• Performance in a class is typically based on an exam that scored by the same professor teaching the class. This means that the professor can increase easily increase (or decrease) scores by "teaching to the test" or simply by inflating/deflating them directly
  
• Student evaluations are subject to a number of biases, including the physical attractiveness of the instructor (oh well, I'm screwed...). In addition, they're endogenous with respect to expected grades.
  

Here's a very interesting paper that addresses these problems, written by Scott Carroll (of UC-Davis) and James West (at the USAF Academy). The paper, titled "Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors" uses some of the unique features of the class assignment system at the U.S. Air Force Academy to disentangle some of the confounding effects that make testing the professor quality/student performance so challenging. At the USAF, students are randomly assigned to class sections, faculty in common courses teach from a single common syllabus, and exams are jointly graded by all faculty teaching the course. Here's the abstract (note: italics are mine):

It is difficult to measure teaching quality at the post-secondary level because students typically self-select" their coursework and their professors. Despite this, student evaluations of professors are widely used in faculty promotion and tenure decisions. We exploit the random assignment of college students to professors in a large body of required coursework to examine how professor quality affects student achievement. Introductory course professors significantly affect student achievement in contemporaneous and follow-on related courses, but the effects are quite heterogeneous across subjects. Students of professors who as a group perform well in the initial mathematics course perform significantly worse in follow-on related math, science, and engineering courses. We find that the academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of mathematics and science professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous student achievement, but positively related to follow-on course achievement. Across all subjects, student evaluations of professors are positive predictors of contemporaneous course achievement, but are poor predictors of follow-on course achievement.

So, "higher quality" professors result in better long-term performance for their students. But at the same time, their students get lower grades in the foundations courses. This could be a result of lower quality instructors "teaching to the test", or of better instructors teaching in a way that's geared more towards follow-on classes at the expense of focusing on the intro materials (those ar tow ways of saying the same thing, BTW).

If you don't have access to NBER, you can read an ungated version of the paper here.

HT: Kids Prefer Cheese

A Fairly High Profile (Non) Tenure Case

Inside Higher Education profiles the tenure case of Boyce Watkins, an untenured African-American assistant finance professor at Syracuse University. He was recently denied tenure.

What make his case interesting is that he's been quite possibly one of the highest-profile assistant professors at a non-tier1 school I've ever seen. He's got a list of media appearances longer than my arm (heck - longer than both arms), all of which you can see on his website here. His research record has been fairly good (not outstanding, but not terrible), with a couple of solid b-level publications (both sole-authored), and a number of pubs in lower-tier outlets.

My take is that he ruffled feathers. Whether fair or not, most assistant professor are not clear slam-dunks for tenure. Since most are therefore somewhere near the margin, the non-publishing things end up having a disproportionate impact. So, having a reputation for being a "good" colleague makes a big impact at most schools. This means having at least a few people who will have your back and almost no one who's looking to stick a knife in it.

So, I can understand Dr. Watkins not getting tenure. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I understand it.

And yes, this is one of the reasons I blog under a pseudonym. Maybe after tenure, I'll change. But for now, I'll play defense, thank you very much.

Giving an Academic Talk

I can count the number of really good (i.e. memorable) academic presentations I've seen on one hand. If I lower the bar to "pretty good", there's still only a limited list.

If you want to improve your presentation skills, here's a very good collection of advice on how to give an academic presentation from Jonathan Shewchuck, a Computer Science professor at Berkeley. Even if you're not a CS guy, read it anyway - most of what he discusses is relevent to almost any presentation. He breaks down just about everything you need to know:

• How to make sure your slides are clean and crisp (less is more)
• How to organize the presentation (more time on motivation and less on technical details)
• Helpful advice on actually giving the talk (be aware of nonverbal communication).

I'd argue that even most experienced presenters can pick up a tip or two from his piece. Once a given bit of research is completed, it's very hard to improve its quality without significant cost. On the other hand, it's relatively easy to improve your ability to present your research. And the marginal payoff to increased presentation skills is pretty big -- conference presentations are a critical part of building your academic and professional reputation, and if you're on a campus visit, your research presentation is one of the most important factors in determining whether you'll get an offer.

So read Shewchuck's list here before your next presentation.

You're Known By The Company You Keep

I catch one or more people cheating almost every semester. Most times, it's of the "cheat sheet on exams" variety. But sometimes, it involves plagiarism on a project.

I have less and less of a problem with it as time goes on, because I give very detailed guidelines as to what should go in each section of the project. So the likelihood that they'll be able to plagiarize something that matches up with the assignment's requirements is somewhere between slim and none. But still, it happens.

Here's a cautionary tale for those of you who have to do do group projects from Jacqueline Passey, who's now back to blogging (and with a new, improved title for her blog to boot). One of her group members plagiarized a good portion of her "contribution" to a group project in an accounting class. Luckily, Jacqueline caught it before handing it in and redid the work herself.

It's important to remember - if a member of your group plagiarizes on a joint project and the instructor catches it, you're equally screwed. So choose your group carefully, and check their work. If it has your name on it, you're responsible.

HT: Newmarks Door.

update 5/23: The link was to the wrong piece. It's been updated.

Grade Too Tough And You'll Be Denied Tenure

Inside Higher Education just posted a troubling article involving the case of Steven Aird, a Biology professor at Norfolk State University (a Historically Black College in Virginia). He was known for being a pretty tough grader, and failed 80% of his students some semesters. What makes it troubling is that the university had a policy that if a student missed more than 20% of the class, he or she could be failed. And in fact, Aird's records showed that the average student in his class missed almost twice that many classes. So, just by following the college's policies, the expected grade in the class should have been an F.

Unfortunately, the university also had an unofficial policy that 70% of their students would get passing grades. So, they ended up crucifying the guy for holding the students to the very standard that the university itself had officially set.

RTWT here, and also read the comments that follow.

Grading - The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Sometimes I think I'm in a Godfather movie (i.e. "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in").

Actually, it's my own fault. Last week, I had a touch schedule: lack of sleep, doing executive education, an all-day faculty meeting, and only 48 hours between my final exam and when grades had to be posted. With all that, I somehow managed to get it all done.

Or maybe not.

Turns out I made an error in my grading spreadsheet. Not surprising, since I use the excel functions quite a bit in grading - I pick the highest "n out of k" quizzes, weight the exams differently based on whether then grade on the final is better than on one or more of the earlier exams, and have a few other curves built in.

As a result, I usually spend a LOT of time debugging the spreadsheet before assigning final grades. But not this time.

So now I have to file about a half-dozen grade change forms.

Grading - the gift that keeps on giving.

With a bit of luck, I should be able to get back to productive stuff by this afternoon.

update: regrading is done - only a few grades actually needed to be changed. Now, back to research!.

Q&A With Myron Scholes

Here's a short "Crash Course" interview with Nobel Laureate Myron Scholes, conducted by Deborah Solomon.

The guy's got a sense of humor. Who'da thunk it?

It's Time To Bring The Crop In

It's that time of the semester - exams are done, projects are in (with one exception) and it's grading time. Some highlights/low lights:

• My Student Managed Investment fund was a weak group, and they never seemed to "get with the program". As a result, they did a lot of the work for the end-of-semester presentation to our advisory board in the 11th hour.
  
• Having said that, they did a pretty good job in the presentation. Not as good as last year's group (that was probably my strongest group in the last 5 years), but good enough
• My Investments class did terribly on my final exam. On the one hand, it means that grades will be lower than expected. On the other, since grades will depend a lot on the curve, it allows me a lot of flexibility.
• I have THREE students that will be returning for my student-managed investment fund class next semester (they're three of the better ones, too). This makes my job a lot easier.
  

On non-job related things, I'm mostly trying to put in enough miles on my bike so that I'll be ready for the Hole In The Wall Gang Angel Ride. It's a relatively hilly 50 miler, and, while I'm pretty sure I can finish it, it'll be ugly. So, I'm trying to squeeze in a few more 25-30 milers in the next two weeks. It's a good cause (check out the link above.).

Unfortunately, yesterday involved a pretty hard 26 miler followed in short order by my 1 1/2 hour "Yoga For Stiff Guys" class (fairly strenuous yoga done in a heated room). BY the end of the day, I was beat to the bone.

Oh well - back to grading those last few student projects.

Stick A Fork In Me - I'm Done!

Just handed in grades for the semester. As usual, there was a pretty broad range of performance, and many of the usual cast of characters (the names change every semester, but the acts never do):

• The obviously extremely bright student who doesn't take proper care on his assignments and does them at the last minute. This results in a low score on 20% of the total grade, which along with his poor attendance (class participation is another 20% of the grade) makes it difficult to do well in the class. Then on the exam he gets one of the highest grades in the class (Final Grade: "B", when he was clearly capable of an "A").
• The not-so bright kid who is more passionate about finance than any student I've seen in the last five years. He ends up getting one of the highest grades in the class on the exam (Final Grade: "A", when I thought at the start that he'd probably be lucky to get a "B-").
  
• The charming one who tries to be my buddy, but doesn't do the hard work necessary to grasp the material on more than a surface level (Final Grade: "C"). Then he can't understand why he got such a poor grade (I guess math is also not his strong point).
  
• The student who failed the class last semester and retakes it this semester. She "Gets Religion" and works her tail off this time around (Final Grade: "B-"
• The student who failed the class last semester and retakes it this semester. He learns nothing from the experience and approaches it the same way he did last time, with the same results (Final Grade: "D+").

So, it was the usual mixed bag, with some surprising performances on both ends of the distribution. Either way, I can now put paid to this school year, and start on a couple of research projects that need my attention.

Now, all I have to do is get out of town before the emails and calls start coming in. I need to figure out how to put an autoresponse on my email that says "Dr. XXX is currently out of the office. He is recuperating from the stress of grading your papers on a dry (no alcohol permitted) campus. He will be back in a couple of weeks after recuperating and getting all the sand out of his swim trunks."

Exam Blogging

I'm in the midst of giving my Advanced Corporate Finance class their final. Since it's open-book/ open-notes, monitoring costs are almost zero (I just have to check for occasional peeking at others' papers).

So, in the next three hours, I get to grade my other final exam, do some reviewing for CFA, and empty out my cache of unblogged items.

All hail the open-book exam. Of course, the cost is that I can't do multiple choice or simple definitional -type questions, so it takes longer to make up an exam. But since they're seniors, they shouldn't be seeing those types of exams in any case (that doesn't meant that some of my colleagues don't give multiple choice exams, but that's another story).

Dartmouth's 'Hostile' Environment'

Here's a great piece in today's Wall Street Journal (off the Opinionjournal.com site, so it's free).

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will "name names."

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."

Read the whole thing here.

I think Professor Venkatesan would like my students - they tend not to challenge ideas much (or participate in class much at all).

But seriously - this lady is destined to end up as the punchline on a bad joke. Can you imagine a professor being upset because students actually challenged his/her teachings in class? That's a perfect opportunity to get them engaged, discussing, and thinking critically. That's the stuff we work for.

I get the impression that that's not what she had in mind. I guess it's not just students who are "Snowflakes" (i.e. each special, unique in their own way, and deserving of kudos for every little accomplishment).

I'll leave it to my readers to come up with the "appropriate" responses.

Sorry - gotta go before I start ranting. Must. Drink. Coffee.

update: Mike Munger provides a nifty link to a treasure trove of info on this case from Ivygate. I really should get back to work, but this is like watching a train wreck, but with PoMo nonsence trown in as a bonus.

Another New Academic Finance Blog

I think it's good practice to mention new blogs of note -- I got some mention by established bloggers early on, and it helped a lot. So, I try pass the favor along and mention new blogs as I come across them - particularly when they're finance or academic in nature.

In this case, here's one that's both: Finance Clippings, run by Richard Warr, a finance professor at North Carolina State University.

I've read Richard's work (and enjojed it) for years, and have even crossed paths with him at conferences on a number of occasions. He seems to have both the academic chops and personal characteristics necessary to make for a good blog. Based on his first few posts, he seems to be off to a good start, and is focusing on material that he'll use in his classes.

So welcome to the Blogosphere, Richard.

Now everyone go check out his blog -- it's been added to the blogroll.

The Semester Winds Down

It's that time of the year - I have one more day of classes, followed by final exams. My student-managed investment fund did a bang-up job on their end-of-semester presentation to the advisory board, so that's another big item to cross off the list.

So now all I have to do is write a couple of final exams, grade them and some final projects, and start my summer.

The only downside to the end of the spring semester is that there are always a couple of students who thought they were "graduating seniors" who found out only the second part of the phrase is correct. But for the most part, they already know where they stand.

Now it's on to summer research and studying for the CFA level 2 exam (only 42 days until the big one).

The Default Major

A colleague just pointed out a great article in the New York Times, titled "The Default Major". Here's a few choice pieces:

Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.

...

Donald R. Bacon, a business professor at the University of Denver, studied group projects at his institution and found a perverse dynamic: the groups that functioned most smoothly were often the ones where the least learning occurred. That’s because students divided up the tasks in ways they felt comfortable with. The math whiz would do the statistical work, the English minor drafted the analysis. And then there’s the most common complaint about groups: some shoulder all the work, the rest do nothing.

“I understand that teamwork is important, but in my opinion they need to do more to deal with the problem of slackers,” says Justin Triplett, a 2010 Radford graduate who is completing his first year in Radford’s M.B.A. program. From his perch as a teaching assistant, he estimates that a third of students in the business school don’t engage with their schoolwork. At Radford, seniors in business invest on average 3.64 hours a week preparing for class, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement.

...

One senior accounting major at Radford, who asked not to be named so as not to damage his job prospects, says he goes to class only to take tests or give presentations. “A lot of classes I’ve been exposed to, you just go to class and they do the PowerPoint from the book,” he says. “It just seems kind of pointless to go when (a) you’re probably not going to be paying much attention anyway and (b) it would probably be worth more of your time just to sit with your book and read it.”

How much time does he spend reading textbooks?

“Well, this week I don’t have any tests, so probably zero,” he says. “Next week I’ll have a test, so maybe 10 hours then.”

He adds: “It seems like now, every take-home test you get, you can just go and Google. If the question is from a test bank, you can just type the text in, and somebody out there will have it and you can just use that.”

Let's see - the students don't study as much, they minimize effort, cheat on take-home exams, and don't come to class prepared.

These sound like things I've heard my own colleagues say in the hallways at Unknown University.

Nothing new. But somehow, there are professors in my school (several come to mind without much effort) who hold the students to high standards AND get top evaluations. The common threads in their classes is that they DEMAND that students come to class prepared and cold-call from day one. And they make classroom performance (either measured by the quality of participation or by numerous in-class quizzes (often of the unannounced, "pop quiz" variety) a major part of the grade.

Of course, they work a lot harder than the other professors in the classroom, but DUH.

Students will slack, not go to class, and cheat like crazy if all the instructor does is read off PowerPoint slides and give softball take-home assignments. They're rational, after all.

I view the course design (of which the grading scheme is a major part) as a mechanism design problem. In other words, it's an exercise in putting together a grading scheme that forces the students into behaviors that I want them to engage.

For the most part, they're rational - they'll find a way to get the grade they want while minimizing effort. The trick is to set the class up so that they can't slack. Unfortunately. that's harder than the old "30% of the class grade is based on the mid-term, 50% on the final, and 20% on quizzes" structure.

But it's possible.

A Crazy Week

The semester is winding down - only two weeks of classes to go. Still, they'll be crazy ones. I just got back from a conference, which took several days out of my schedule. The next few days I'll be feverishly trying to finish up a paper for submission in time for a colleague to put it on her 3-year mid-tenure review (if we get it submitted by Friday he can count it, but not if we submit it later. And since he hasn't done as much writing in the last three years as he should have, this piece is important to him.

In addition, my student-managed investment fund class has to prepare our end-of-semester report for our advisory board, and I still have to create a couple of problem sets and final exams in the next week.

I know I say this every year at this time, but man, am I tired. But at least it's only two more weeks and then finals (followed by alcohol, and then sleep).

Ah well, it still beats a job in industry by a country mile.

A Rough Week, and A (Small) Pleasant Surprise

A rough week in the Unknown Household. My sister and mother were planning on driving down Sunday to see the Unknown Baby. Then Saturday, I got a call that my mom had had a heart attack and passed out on the floor. She's all right, and is currently resting comfortably (??) in the ICU waiting to have surgery (she has four "minor" blockages). The surgery will be either Wednesday or Thursday. So, yesterday I drove the two hours to the hospital to visit her. With the Unknown Baby-induced sleep deprivation, it took a fair bit of effort to make it safely there and back.

Today, I taught my classes, and was just getting ready to head back home for a much-needed nap (man - these midnight feeding are getting old very quickly) when I got a call from two coauthors (a former colleague and a former student). They told me that a paper of ours had been accepted at the American Accounting Association (AAA) annual meeting.

It was particularly good news because I didn't even know (or more likely, had forgotten) that it had even been submitted. So, it's like found money. Not a big deal, but I'll take it.

Ah well, it's midnight, and Unknown Baby has input/output issues.