ECON 3020

Overall I enjoyed this class. I think Westerfield is a really good lecturer though, and I for sure recommend her. She’s engaging and knows what she’s talking about. Exams are not the easiest but there are plenty of other assingments to even it out like questions of the day, MEL assignments, and problem sets which are never too bad. The content is hard but she really tries to make sure people understand it which is nice. #tCFspring2021

This class was not hard at all. The material is very simple and there isn't really any hard math that you need to be able to do. I'd say the two things that bothered me were (1) the amount of work we had and (2) the amount of information we needed to know for exams (lecture material, certain articles and podcasts). Though the material is easy, it is fast-paced so you need to keep up with it. To be honest, though, a lot of it was pretty intuitive and/or repetitive so the second complaint that I have isn't that significant.

Professor Westerfield is also very kind and understanding, so she's very flexible when it comes to scheduling on-call dates which I really appreciated, as my on-call dates tended to fall on weeks when I had a lot of homework or exams. Definitely one of the nicest professors I've ever had. I would 100% recommend taking this class with her. #tCFS24

I really enjoy Westerfield as a professor, as I had her for ECON 3010 and knew I wanted to take ECON 3020 with her. I'm not sure I would recommend taking it with her going forward or if she'll be teaching it again after this semester. She had a heart attack that caused her to take about half of the semester off which I think made the class a lot more difficult for us and there weren't any major adjustments on grades to account for that gap in learning. I think Westerfield is an incredible professor, but I would be hesitant to register to another one of her courses (if she teaches any more) just because of how difficult this semester ended up being without her there. Additionally, I think the organization of her ECON 3010 class is much easier to follow, and she switched her On Calls to using iClicker which I almost feel like was worse and didn't aid our learning much. Incredible lecturer and thankful for the classes I did get to take with her.

Syllabus: MC Average 10%, Problem Set Average 10%, Exam 1 20%, Exam 2 20%, iClicker 5%, Final 35%

Overview: I think people should take Intermediate Macro with Westerfield, but there definitely should be some warnings when it comes to her class. Intermediate Macro is a lot of content and Westerfield uses slides that make it difficult to capture all lesson info when in-class. She moves through slides very quickly and draws graphs by hand, which in my opinion, made it difficult to follow along at certain points. This resulted in me having to practically review all posted slides in entirety before taking exams.

As an econ major, I enjoyed this course and found a majority of the content to be interesting. It consists of a lot of economic models involving graphs (like most econ courses), so be prepared to plot supply-demand in many different variations during the course.

There will be times that lecture can be quite boring, but in order to earn the iClicker points, you need to answer questions during class to meet a requirement to get the full 5% on your grade. I found this to be frustrating because lecture was not the most beneficial to my learning.

MCs and Problem Sets were manageable. In both it is possible to achieve near perfect scores if you put time and effort into completing them. For the problem sets, you can work with a group of 4 or 5, which is very helpful. Problem sets are organized by your TA and my section was not required to attend discussions to earn points.

Exams are the bulk of this class and to prepare for them you will need to study a lot. Questions are not extremely difficult, but they will test your in-depth knowledge of the course units. Make sure to understand each model in its entirety when going into exams. The average exam grades tend to sit around the mid-80s. They are the key to your grade, and it seems like a majority of course scores tend to sit in the B to A- range.