
Student fury over 'impossible' economics exam - DanBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-31057005
======
arethuza
I can remember quite a few university exams where my initial reaction was
"What the ^-&%! is this?" \- but you had to stay calm [1], work through it and
try and actually apply the logical thinking you were supposed to be learning.

That question they have a picture of looks like something I could _attempt_ an
answer to - and I've never studied economics.

1\. The actual advice I remember from my dear old mum was "keep the heid".

~~~
tokai
>That question they have a picture of looks like something I could attempt an
answer to - and I've never studied economics.

My thought as well. If we assume that they have been introduced to
'coordination cost', it should be easy to answer. Non of the three sub-
questions are even about calculating, they are about discussing the concepts
of a very simple model.

~~~
gmarx
Even if you haven't maybe it is. I might be overly cocky here but it seems
obvious what kinds of costs these are and why the simple model is the way it
is. Why is the exponent on N greater than 1? Because otherwise coordination
costs would decrease as you add more people, right? Are their complaints
basically that the exact answer to this question should have been available in
the notes and that they shouldn't have to apply past knowledge and techniques
to an unfamiliar problem?

~~~
mturmon
"Because otherwise coordination costs would decrease as you add more people,
right?"

Not so fast, or you might lose 10 points. ;-) Note that the coordination cost
is given per-capita, and it is proportional to N^2. If the per-capita cost was
O(N^a) for a < 1, the total cost would still be N __*N^a = N^(1+a) which
increases with N.

If the (per-capita) coordination cost were proportional to N, that would
indicate that (e.g.) to do something, you have to contend with "N" other
people (everyone else in the population), which makes sense.

The total coordination cost would be: (N people) X (per-capita cost of N) =
N^2, which is familiar from various kind of networks, e.g., distributed
computations in which total communication costs can rise like N^2 (where N is
the number of processors).

But if the per-capita cost is proportional to N^a for some a > 1, that's even
stronger. I'm not sure how you justify that. I'm sure you can, I'm just not
sure how the course did it.

Maybe you say that you have to coordinate with all N other people, as well as
all pairs of the N other people. The number of pairs of other people is
proportional to N^2, giving you a per-capita coordination cost proportional to
N^2.

~~~
titanomachy
Without knowing what coordination cost is, that would be my guess. I'd
probably phrase it vaguely like "the cost of coordinating N people is
proportional to the number of connections between those people, i.e.
proportional to N^2".

But that might be less obvious to an econ student who's never studied
complexity theory.

~~~
mturmon
But I fear, from what you wrote, that you fell into the same trap as @gmarx
above.

The claim in the exam is that the _total_ coordination cost is above
quadratic, i.e. proportional to N^b for some "b" strictly larger than 2.
(Because per-capita cost is proportional to N^a for some "a" strictly larger
than 1.)

This is not what is typically assumed in complexity theory.

------
taylodl
Aren't these students effectively claiming it's too much to expect them to
know basic calculus as they're about to graduate with a degree in economics?
That doesn't seem like a wholly unreasonable expectation to me and if they're
unable to do so then what kinds of problems are they expecting to encounter
when they get jobs?

Maybe student expectations could have been managed better but I wouldn't think
you'd have to explain to economics students preparing to graduate that they
should expect to utilize basic calculus during an exam.

~~~
mathieuh
I've been educated in and am studying in the UK at the moment, and for us
exams are meant to examine how well you know the content of the course (or so
we're told). If the students are correct in saying that the exam contained
questions regarding things they'd never seen or had experience of before, then
in my opinion the exam was unreasonable.

Throughout my entire academic career exams have worked this way, so regardless
of whether they ought to know it for The Real World, if they haven't been
taught it then it shouldn't have been on the exam.

~~~
deong
My first impression looking at the questions was that they were intended to
take the knowledge they had gained during the course and apply it to what may
have been an unfamiliar circumstance.

Done correctly, that's a completely fair exam. I'm sort of inclined to think
that if there's this much smoke, something's probably on fire though. I know
my own students will complain about silly things, but if they _all_ complain
about something, invariably I end up agreeing with them.

~~~
basseq
That's an apt comparison: if no (or painfully few) students were able to give
at least a reasonable answer, the problem lays in the teaching curriculum or
methodology. (This may not be the course itself, it may be a broader question
about hand-holding an academia or similar, but the question remains.)

I remember a particular instance in Geometry in high school. Everyone did
poorly, so the teacher allowed us to work together to answer the questions
again. My group was stuck on a particular question, so I asked the teacher to
clarify. She refused, saying we were taught it. I retorted that since everyone
was struggling, clearly the problem was on the other side of the desk. (It
went over about as well as you might expect.)

------
AndrewKemendo
This happened a couple of times when I was in my econ undergrad - and was done
purposefully so that we would have to think way outside of the box and apply
previous economic theory to "derive" new conclusions.

Nothing controversial here except for a bunch of whiny students who should
know better given that it is their final year.

~~~
lycoperdon
This happened to me once in a freshman chemistry class. The course had a few
hundred students and most of them failed the first preliminary exam. The
questions bore no resemblance to what we had covered in class, and one was
based on a recent publication. As far as I know, the one person to do well was
already a chemistry superstar prior to the course. The professor chewed us all
out afterwards for not applying ourselves. I'm still angry about it to this
day. None of us were dumb or not trying. Either she failed as a professor to
teach us what she expected us to learn, or she was placing unreasonable
expectations on us to derive new conclusions during a stressful exam. It's not
wrong to expect someone to make leaps based on something they've newly
learned, but there is surely a better context for that.

------
bbrks
I'm currently in my final year of university too (not at Sheffield) and I was
amazed at how many announcements had to be made during the recent exams (2
weeks ago) to correct questions, some multiple ones per paper.

If it's only a 3-4 page exam, with only 3-5 questions in total, they should
probably have been read through and attempted by a couple of lecturers
beforehand.

What made it even worse was that I am at a Welsh university, so announcements
have to be made both in English and in Welsh. Disrupting anybody doing a
different exam and causing hassle for the students taking the incorrect one.

------
sprkyco
Disclaimer: I am attending Park University online B.S. Information Computer
Science doubtful anyone on HN would even consider this as a credential or a
legitimate learning experience to offer insight on econ exams.

Going against the grain here I can understand the student's frustration when
tests are implemented to establish a metric that is ultimately attached to a
record of sorts and in some cases can affect the psyche of the student.

My example that is somewhat related was during a "Web Programming" course we
were taught basic things like DHTML, CSS, JavaScript etc. All culminating in a
final project of a personal website, nothing to difficult there.However due to
the nature of online courses I had to take a test at a proctored location with
a computer. One week prior to the exam being sent out instructor notified us
that "Administration has mandated this to be a written test." This really
threw my game off. I'm not sure any developers have ever tried "writing" a
full webpage including CSS and Error checks for form fields on a sheet of
paper but it definitely affected my performance on the test. During the class
we it was in now way imparted upon us that writing code with a pencil would be
our final artifact of having learned something in the course.

As much as I and many people I have met attribute intelligence to critical and
problem solving skills. The reality of "normal" institutional teaching
emphasizes the ability to take tests and remember data only dumping and moving
on to another subject to repeat the process. The over arching theme, in my
experiences, is that remembering and regurgitating topics in the course was/is
the most rewarded endeavor. For some it is very difficult to escape this
conditioning of remembering and studying material in order to get the right
answers on a test with critical and problem skills existing only as a side
effect of "learning".

------
notacoward
Out here in the real world, it's _incredibly common_ for people to be thrown
at a problem only slightly related to prior experience. My entire involvement
with SCSI came about this way. My brother got his start in professional IT
because the financial publishing company where he was a proofreader had
computerized and needed someone to handle backups. This test, if fairly
graded, might tell more about students' prospects for future success than a
traditional test would have.

~~~
astazangasta
This comment is bonkers. This isn't the real world, where you can look things
up on Google, or ask your economist friend, or email Brad Delong for help.
This is a university exam. The whole fucking point of it is to test your
understanding of the material covered in the course.

~~~
logn
I've taken lots of exams where they expect you to _apply_ the knowledge you've
mastered in a course to solve a new problem.

~~~
bentcorner
And that's certainly an important skill to have. But it doesn't appear to have
been taught in the class.

This is like sitting in a driver's ed. classroom for a few weeks, and then
putting you in your car for the actual test with no practice in the middle.

------
zachwf
When I was in school there were plenty of tests for which the class average
was under 50%. Obviously professors wouldn't try to write them this way, but
writing a test that's hard but not _too_ hard is, well, hard.

It frankly was never that big of a deal. Professors would generally curve the
test and life would go on.

Certainly this doesn't merit a BBC story. If everyone bombed the test, then
the professor should obviously consider giving it a healthy curve.

~~~
darkmighty
I had numerical analysis tests on my first year with <20% avg. on a good
school. The problem here seems to be not difficulty but scope, in which case
I'd say the complaints are justified. Still not warranting a BBC story.

------
logfromblammo
I haven't taken the class.

3.a. Specialization and trade. An exponent less than one would imply that a
system with more elements has a lesser coordination complexity than each
element acting independently. Such would only be possible if humans became
telepathic when forced into close proximity.

3.b. Consumption per person would be equal to the usable output of each
person, minus overhead losses, minus stockpiling and savings. Assuming the
latter to be zero, consumption is x = sigma N^0.5 - gamma N^2. To find minima
and maxima, we take the first derivative with respect to N, and find where it
is zero. 0.5 sigma N^-0.5 - 2 gamma N = 0. The non-imaginary solution is
N=(sigma/4 gamma)^(2/3).

3.c. Plug N=2 into the above equation. To support cities of that size, gamma
must be less than 9% of sigma. Sigma may be increased by gains in
productivity, such as with specialization. Gamma may be reduced by lowering
coordination burdens, such as by using money instead of barter, or employing
merchant specialists. Changes in gamma have a greater effect on city size, so
given the equal-cost choice between a universal education mandate and a
guaranteed uniform currency standard, the latter is preferable, if larger
cities are desired.

If student economists cannot think their way through that problem, we may
assume that they will have a detrimental future effect upon both sigma and
gamma, and we should therefore kill them now before they cause our cities to
collapse. Judging by Detroit, we may already be too late.

~~~
geoffbrown
Agree on both counts. This question seems to have an appropriate level of
difficulty for the student rank and written in a fairly intelligible manner.
Can't speak to the rest of the test, but I don't find this question off sides
at all. And yes it is very likely too late.

------
ffn
Initially, I was on-board the whole "yeah, screw you school!" train with the
students (presumably left over trauma from being intellectually sodomized by
UC Berkeley's physics department), but then I read the prompt 3 in question.
And I have to say, I really really like that question because it's not only
testing the student on memorized economics tidbits, but also on truly applying
learned theory and economics intuition to a more alive problem.

In fact, even though I'm suppose to be slaving over getting onDisconnect to
clean up correctly in Emberfire for my boss before the afternoon whipping, I
can't help but have fun solving this problem:

1\. the gamma (coordination) term is N _N because people all have their own
opinions and agendas which they have to tell everyone else. In other words, if
there are 3 people, person A must tell his idea to person B and person C,
person B must tell his to Person A and C, etc., and in total there are 9
"tellings" (aka meetings).

2\. The graph of production-v-person and cost-v-person, if plotted onto the
same paper, would look like the lower case letter gamma tilted 45 degrees to
the right. The most-bang-for-your-buck optimal city size would be were ( g _ N
* N - a * sqrt N ) is largest. If I knew calculus and can do derivatives, I
can get N = ( a / 4g ) ^ 2/3 as the answer.

3\. A peasant city is one where (a / 4g) <= 1, that is, where talking to other
people is really really hard but doing things is really easy (lol just like at
my work, where we're all peasants and we slave for months only to have our
projects cancelled and the blamed placed on us). "a" and "g" can change with
technological improvements, for example, "g" can go up when the society
discovers email, the telephone, writing, etc., and it can go down when the
society discover facebook of 4chan (and then we all spend our time being
holier-than-thou, insulting each others' tastes, and disparaging each others'
waifus). "a" can go up with the development of productivity tools; an example
of this in the javascript world where I hail from is when jashkenas
discovering coffeescript, wycats + tom dale inventing ember, etc. "a" can go
down when you get a legal department who insists you can't use X, can't
contribute to Y, and I must watch my language F.

~~~
anon4
I can't see where we can estimate the per-capita consumption though. We know
the communication cost and the per-capita production, but I don't see how I
can derive total consumption from that.

Also, gamma has a loop in it and the function we're dealing with is a
surjection, so its graph can't have a loop.

~~~
ffn
I was plotting 2 functions (the production function and the cost-of-production
aka communication cost function) onto the same graph and looking only at the
top-right part where X > 0 and Y > 0, in this case, X = number of people and Y
= money (either produced or consumed). The production function, because of its
sqrt(N), looks like a U flipped on its side. Meanwhile, the cost function,
because of its N^2, looks like a regular U. If you have a U sitting with its
butt on 0,0, and a U lying down on 0,0, and you look only at the top-right
coordinate plane, it'd look kind of like the letter gamma tilted 45 degrees.

Regarding per-capita consumption and total consumption, if you have per-capita
consumption, and you have N the total number of people, you can multiple per-
capita consumption with the total number of people to get total consumption.
If per-capita consumption varies with the number of people, then a bit of
calculus is needed as you "integrate" per-capita consumption with respect to
number of people to find "the area under the curve" which is your total
consumption. But if the students have not yet learned calculus, I can see how
it could be unfair to have them derive calculus during the test.

------
fnordfnordfnord
I've been accused of this same thing with some of the exams I have given in
the past. I'll assume that most instructors probably have. Sometimes the
complaints are justified, and sometimes I believe that the students have just
not prepared well. Even without mass protests, I will sometimes notice that a
significant fraction of students performed poorly on one or more
questions/sections, and take that as an indication that I have either not
covered that unit's material as well as in the past, or that I have asked the
question(s) in a way that was unclear. I can't say whether or not this exam
was fair, but I can say that if 90% of students make similar complaints, that
I would have to take a hard look at the way I had managed the course prior to
the exam.

------
gambiting
Sorry,but I can only laugh. In Poland it was completely normal and almost
expected for 100% of students to fail an Engineering or Math exam on their
first try. There would be 50 people taking the exam and literally 45-50 would
fail. Most people pass their exams on the 3-4th try. What adds insult to the
injury is that most professors offer "0th" exam chance for those with best
grades - so out of group of 50, maybe 5 would be offered to take an exam
earlier than everyone else. Commonly, no one passes those exams, they are just
ultra hard with super short time limits.

And then there is this question in the article - if you are studying economy
you really can't answer a calculus question?

------
ChuckMcM
There is certainly a COllegeHumor or Onion post in there somewhere. While I
agree with most people that difficult exams are par for the course, the
response here will be informative for the classes following this one.

But what I found surprising from this story was that these kids are in their
final year and their expectations are completely out of alignment with what
the University required in the exam. It makes me wonder if the earlier years
were extra easy? or this last year extra hard? And why aren't they prepared to
think by the time they get to their final year?

------
murbard2
I get \sigma < 4 \gamma for 3.c, did I understand this correctly?

The model doesn't make much sense to me. Why would the _per person_
coordination cost be quadratic. You'd expect something maybe linear.

~~~
eddotman
I've never taken economics, but is it possible that this is sort of a
combinatorial reason? Like, adding the N+1th person implies coordinating with
N other people, so that's a quadratic growth. I'm not really sure if that's
realistic though...

~~~
murbard2
That's quadratic growth for the city, not _per person_. It's linear growth per
person.

------
chatmasta
Why is this a news story?

~~~
DanBC
In England University education has changed dramatically over the past few
years.

Introduction of fees means that some students see an education as a product
that they're buying, with that kind of "customer service" expectation tacked
on.

Education is always news-worthy in England because politics.

We often see articles about exams (at all levels) going wrong - bad questions;
cheating schools; bad marking; etc.

~~~
sprkyco
It is interesting to see this reaction. In the US we have been paying for
education for quite some time and the thought that it is a product and
students the purchaser and benfactor of that product does not seem to be a
very important topic rather it is met with some levels of resistance and blame
on the students when "we" fail or otherwise complain about our educational
experiences. Lots' of walking through snow uphill both ways reactions from
professors and attendees of college/university.

------
logn
There's a difference between doing math proofs and solving equations, and
understanding problems quantitatively (which requires some basic math
competency as a prerequisite). The sample question suggests it was the latter.
It's like an algorithms question where the professor tells you not to do math,
just think in Big O.

------
DanBC
I don't know Sheffield Uni and I don't know the courses.

Are these the course being discussed?

[https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/economics/undergraduate/degrees/...](https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/economics/undergraduate/degrees/l101)

> The BSc Economics course places particular emphasis on the mathematical and
> statistical techniques used in economic analysis. It's suitable for students
> with A Level Maths or equivalent. In each year you take modules to the value
> of 120 credits.

[http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/economics/undergraduate/entry](http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/economics/undergraduate/entry)

> AAB including B in Maths

(That's 3 A level qualifications, of which one must be grade B in Math).

> BA Economics and Politics (LL12) AAB

That's just 3 A levels, no math requirement.

I hope the people with no math were suitably warned before hand about the math
requirements.

------
j_s
I remember memorizing the capitalization and white-space in answers knowing
the home-brew auto-grading system would require an exact match on every answer
for the final in one class... awareness of what's coming (even meta
implementation details) definitely reduces the stress levels!

------
klochner
Same story when I was at Duke. Students can get either a BA or a BS in Econ,
where the BS requires more math courses. Many BA students freaked out when
there was calculus on the first exam.

As a EE major I found it pretty amusing.

------
al2o3cr
"The joint honours students were particularly badly affected as many lacked
the mathematical background of the BSc students."

Whine some more, kiddos. "Honours" my ass.

------
DanBC
This article either got flagged or tripped some HN mechanism because an hour
after it was posted it had 25 points but was at 140.

That's a shame because some of the comments here talking about the question
are interesting.

------
joshuaheard
An exam is supposed to test what you are taught. If 90% of the students didn't
understand the exam, they weren't taught properly. That is the teacher's
fault.

------
seba_dos1
Wow, so this is what's newsworthy these days? I had three exams this week that
seemed "impossible", more are coming, where should I write to?

