Final Post

I believe that these rules affected the way I took the course. Let us first focus on nonmandatory attendance. This semester I only had one class that was (somewhat) mandatory and it was my math course. There were iclicker quizzes every lecture and your lowest 4 scores are dropped so essentially you could miss 4 lectures throughout the whole semester. These quizzes combined only end up being 10% of your grade so if you were to miss more it wouldn’t affect it too much. Since it was at 2pm and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I was already up for other classes, so I didn’t miss more than 4. In general, I think that if the course time is in the middle of the day, attendance rates will be higher than morning and night classes. Since it was an earlier class, that declined the inclination on going to class. If it was mandatory, more people would go, but I’m not sure participation would increase that much. The people that would not want to be there wouldn’t pay attention and I also enjoyed how this course was not mandatory because I am writing a statistical research paper and the office hours are during our class time. I’ve been struggling with my code, so I’ve been able to go and get help, but I miss this class. To make up for that, I’ve been reading the book and we have the blog posts that focus on the topics, so I still am learning, just more so on my own. I believe all classes (especially the advanced level courses) should not be mandatory because we are old enough to make the choice on going to class or not. No matter what we get what we put into the course, so if we can learn better on our own then that should be accounted for. Punishing someone for not attending a lecture seems very authoritarian.


On the matter of the soft deadlines, I think this was beneficial on many levels. Students are taking about 16 credit hours on top of jobs, extracurriculars, etc. With our busy schedules and heavy course load, it’s possible that students will have multiple assignments due on the same day. Hypothetically speaking, students can try to get ahead of the work, but even then, it might not be enough. Having a soft deadline allows me to still put the time and effort into getting it right and learn from it instead of guessing and not finishing it. I wish more classes utilized soft deadlines because it takes into consideration other courses and I know that for the most part professors are not grading the work that same day so it will give them time to grade them as they come in. I know I personally will look at a long to-do list and wouldn’t know where to start, but if I break it up into smaller sections, the task seems less daunting. I don’t think that all classes should have a rolling deadline, but at least a few days of grace period. When I was studying abroad, most of my projects and papers had a few days of grace period and it allow students to turn something in late if they were traveling that week or multiple classes had exams.


I think if you were to make changes to the class, I would suggest treating the Tuesday lecture as office hours/ excel homework help and then the Thursday class as a lecture. I felt that some classes were longer than they needed to be, and you could possibly put two lectures into 1. Then, more students would be inclined to attend the Thursday lecture, you wouldn’t really need to have your own office hours, and the students that are struggling on a specific topic can attend the Tuesday lecture. The excel homework is something that I found to be the most beneficial because I had to think and use concepts from earlier economics courses, so I believe that it’s imperative that you continue to utilize them. The blog posts allowed me to reflect on previous situations and analyze them on a more advanced level. The concept quizzes didn’t really help that much because I would read the slides for the quiz and felt that they didn’t really help me with the posts and excel homework, but they were a good way to think about different aspects of organizations and decision making.