ECON 1
Principles of Economics
Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Not open to students with credit for former course 100. Introduction to principles of economic analysis, economic institutions, and issues of economic policy. Emphasis on allocation of resources and distribution of income through price system. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2023 - Professor Ohanian does not seem to care much for students in this class. He appears on Zoom once every two weeks just to repeat what he has already covered in the recorded lectures using another set of slides, saving minimal time for additional Office Hours questions. There is far too little practice questions in the MCQ format of the Midterms and Finals (only 4-5 questions a week that rarely asks about the same content as the test questions): the practice questions in the textbook are formatted completely differently and the practice midterms and finals have far too few questions compared to the real one (e.g. the practice finals had 31 questions while the real one has 76). I understand that they used the Mindtap app for practice MCQ questions in the past years but this year it was discontinued because it was too expensive. However, there is no replacement found for the practices on Mindtap and the exam questions continue to come from Mindtap. Overall, because of the lack of well-organized practice, there is no good mechanism to assess how you are doing in this course and how well you understood the topics until it is too late- when you get bonked in the Finals. This just reinforces the sense that this course is poorly organized and the general feeling (this may be subjective) that the professor is teaching this course part-time and has little attention to spare for ECON 1 students.
Winter 2023 - Professor Ohanian does not seem to care much for students in this class. He appears on Zoom once every two weeks just to repeat what he has already covered in the recorded lectures using another set of slides, saving minimal time for additional Office Hours questions. There is far too little practice questions in the MCQ format of the Midterms and Finals (only 4-5 questions a week that rarely asks about the same content as the test questions): the practice questions in the textbook are formatted completely differently and the practice midterms and finals have far too few questions compared to the real one (e.g. the practice finals had 31 questions while the real one has 76). I understand that they used the Mindtap app for practice MCQ questions in the past years but this year it was discontinued because it was too expensive. However, there is no replacement found for the practices on Mindtap and the exam questions continue to come from Mindtap. Overall, because of the lack of well-organized practice, there is no good mechanism to assess how you are doing in this course and how well you understood the topics until it is too late- when you get bonked in the Finals. This just reinforces the sense that this course is poorly organized and the general feeling (this may be subjective) that the professor is teaching this course part-time and has little attention to spare for ECON 1 students.
Most Helpful Review
Summer 2023 - I took Olivia over the Summer for Econ 1 and I was pleasantly surprised by her class, especially given the other reviews that are there on Bruinwalk. I felt like she was super caring and explained the material quite well. Thankfully, Econ 1 is pretty straightforward in terms of material, so as long as you keep up with the slides and understand how to apply the concepts you'll be fine. The graded assignments consisted of weekly quizzes, a report, course evaluation, and final exam. The open-note quizzes and final felt very fair and, if you understood the material and her slides, then you could easily get an A. She did mess up some of the questions on the first quiz because they included material we didn't really know yet, but she was super responsive and gave us extra points on the quiz to compensate for the mistake. She was always really nice in her office hours and taking it over the Summer was actually a great experience because there were a lot less people than there normally would be in an intro class. Overall, I felt like she was a great professor and I would highly recommend taking her for this class.
Summer 2023 - I took Olivia over the Summer for Econ 1 and I was pleasantly surprised by her class, especially given the other reviews that are there on Bruinwalk. I felt like she was super caring and explained the material quite well. Thankfully, Econ 1 is pretty straightforward in terms of material, so as long as you keep up with the slides and understand how to apply the concepts you'll be fine. The graded assignments consisted of weekly quizzes, a report, course evaluation, and final exam. The open-note quizzes and final felt very fair and, if you understood the material and her slides, then you could easily get an A. She did mess up some of the questions on the first quiz because they included material we didn't really know yet, but she was super responsive and gave us extra points on the quiz to compensate for the mistake. She was always really nice in her office hours and taking it over the Summer was actually a great experience because there were a lot less people than there normally would be in an intro class. Overall, I felt like she was a great professor and I would highly recommend taking her for this class.