Professor Cosar's Trade class was interesting but went at a slower pace than I had hoped. The subject of the course is so broad but by the end, I felt that we had not covered enough. His lectures are boring at times (especially when going through models), but the content for me was interesting enough to stay somewhat attentive. The problem sets (about 6) are fairly easy and so are the exams. Discussion sections were optional which were nice — the ones I did go to were just problem-solving exercises. Overall, I think there are more stimulating electives out there, but you need a 4000-level one where an A is very feasible, I'd take this.

#tCFF23

The class is broken down into 10x weekly quizzes [20%] + 5x homework [40%] + midterm [15%] + final [25%]. I found the class to be pretty interesting as it revolves around different models of trade and their specificities, but Cosar manages to work in some current events as well. He's a pretty nice guy as well and responds to his email very quickly. However, the worst part of this class was the homework which basically is grade-killers -- it's the typical long-math problems that take up hours of your weekend. It's a bonus that each one is worth ~8% of your grade. You'll never have to work through the math problems of that magnitude on the exams which are a combo of MC and short answers, but it still kills your grade when you get a 70 on the HW.

It's not the best class I've ever taken, but it wasn't god awful. I feel more knowledgeable about trade theories than when I walked in and Cosar is always happy to help. Also, the discussion is not super helpful, but every now and then you find some information pretty nice to know about.

Honestly the class isn't that hard or time consuming, the curve is dumb though I ended up having the same grade (A-) I would have gotten without a curve so... that sucked. The first exam is really easy, the second one is harder because he allocated a lot of points to random papers we went over during class rather than the actual models we spent the whole semester studying... The one thing that dragged my grade down was the group homework assignments so take those seriously, I def did not lol