ABOUT MY TEACHING
Welcome to my personal academic website!
As an Assistant Teaching Professor, one of my main roles is to think about the importance of meaningful teaching, learning, and assessment. For example, I have completely re-thought how to teach introductory probability and statistics, by having one small lecture hour per week with students, even when enrollment is over 600 students.
See below for more about my current teaching in the Department of Economics.
Econ 5 - Introduction to Probability and Statistics
Econ 5 is a class unlike any other. This is a large class that is also a small class one day per week. Keep reading for more details.
For two hours per week, the class operates like many other large courses. There is an introductory session at the beginning of the quarter, where I invite student organizations and various offices from around campus to provide navigational help. Traditional lectures then make up most of the time, with a focus on understanding key ideas. Review sessions and a midterm also take up some class time.
In the third lecture hour each week, the instructor meets with a smaller group of 40-50 students in a project-based learning classroom. Students work in small groups, typically 4 or 5 people each, to answer questions related to material recently covered. Some activities cover topics relevant to social issues such as discrimination in pay and lack of bicycle helmets worn on campus. One of the keys to this hour is that students discover that they can collaborate with peers and ask questions to facilitate learning that they were not able to complete in a passive learning environment.
The topics covered are standard for an introduction to probability and statistics: Describing data, probability, discrete and continuous random variables, sampling, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing. Tests assess basic ideas related to these topics, along with knowledge needed to apply the concepts appropriately.
Also unlike many other large introductory courses, Econ 5 relies on many low-stakes assessments making up the majority of the course grade. This includes:
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Credit for attendance and performance on weekly in-lecture activity
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Up to three short online quizzes weekly
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Weekly problem assignments (with 80% threshold for full credit)
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Practice learning the basics of the programming language R
I also allow low scores to be dropped in the non-test assessments listed above, in order to allow for flexibility with students' schedules, short-term illnesses, and occasional conflicts.
The final exam is the only assessment worth more than 10% of the course grade. It is meant to be the summative assessment to ensure mastery of material for those who will later take Econ 140A, an introduction to econometrics.
Econ 134A is an introduction to corporate finance. The course starts with an introduction to the discounting of future cash flows into present values. The early weeks focus on understanding the key ideas of discounting, not just the use of simple formulas.
The second unit of the course begins to examine uncertainty, including valuation of bonds and stocks. This is followed with a unit on the Capital Asset Pricing Model, using their background in statistics to help understand important relationships between risk and expected returns of assets. I finish the course with coverage of other topics I think students find interesting: Behavioral finance, valuing of options, and the importance of the Modigliani and Miller Propositions.
Much of the class time is devoted to finance news and individual case studies. Some topics covered include:
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The implementation of widespread tariffs in the United States
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The risk in ownership in ultra-low cost airlines, including the downfall of Spirit Airlines
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Cost-benefit analysis and changing internal rates of return of new resort construction
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The prevalence of low down payment mortgages, and the resulting financial crisis of 2008
This course is challenging for many students to complete, due to various issues. First, there are two needed upper-division prerequisites, one in intermediate microeconomics, and the other in econometrics. Many students also need to complete the course while interviewing for jobs or (in spring) starting an internship or job before the end of the spring quarter. In order to allow great flexibility, I typically offer four exams in this class, with any combination of three exams sufficient to allocate a course grade. This grading system also allows for higher-performing tests to count for more of the course grade, while lower-performing tests to count for less. This is also important in a finance course due to the difficult time some students have with early important concepts.