I was scare to take it with Zame after reading the reviews down below. But he happened to be a decent professor. He is very straightforward with the materials and keeps his words on what he will or will not test you. Just do his weekly HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT and you will be in good shape for both midterm and final. Go to office hours and find a good TA !!! That is the main key to getting A in this class !

Would highly recommend taking Econ 11 with him! His homework helps prepare you for the tests very well. His lectures are useless, but if you do the homework you should be fine. Put a lot of time and effort into the class and you can do very well. Listen to your TA's!! Andy was amazing and prepares you for the final well.

This class was possibly the worst class I have ever taken in my life.
For everyone who has given this professor good reviews or said that the workload was good or that the professor was helpful is complete BS. These are the people who either don't even need to take the class because they know the material already or people who are taking the class a second time.
If you're a student, like me, who needs to actually learn new material that you haven't known before, then this not the class for you.

My TA was absolutely no help. The first week i went to office hours my TA told me to just read the book after I expressed to her that it's difficult to follow Zame. My TA has taken him in Graduate school and said that he/she just read the book and he/she did okay. We shouldn't have to rely on a book when we pay thousands of dollars for one class.

The homework was NOT discussed during the section, and the homework was often things you lightly touched on in class, but need to research everything else yourself to get a decent grade. Homework is hard, I had a study group and we met twice a week for about 4 hours total to get through the grueling homework. If you absolutely try your hardest and basically teach yourself everything then you should at least pass this class. But be aware that a lot of economic prodigies take this class, so they will set the curve... if there is one.

The lecture is highly unorganized, he does not explain concepts whatsoever and often you don't even know what chapter or concept you're learning because he just does math formulas all the time without any introduction.

Overall I felt like I gained no real knowledge from this class, the little things I did understand I still had no idea what they were and how they applied. This class made me hate economics so much that I changed my major. I want to leave with this, I know I failed and you'll probably think "he's just stupid, that's why he failed" although there may be truth to that lol, Any student has the ability to learn and succeed IF the professor wants to teach.
I would not take this class with this professor if you don't have to.
This is clearly a professor who knows that his tenure has his back. Good luck to anyone who does take the class, there are still those people who pass the class and do well, but the fact that 20% of roughly 280 students fail the class (or about 60 students) should speak volumes about what kind of professor Zame is.

Absolute shitshow of a class. Zame is too caught up in his research or postgrad classes or whatever the fuck to actually give a shit about undergrad econ 11. As a result, all the notes posted on slides are FILLED to the brim with typos, to the point where it actually jeopardizes your understanding of the course. His lectures (about 4 hours a week) are utterly useless, filled with information that have 0 contribution to the course whatsoever. You're forced to go to TA office hours and learn everything from the short discussion period we have every week, OR just brute force teach yourself everything. Midterm/Final are NOTHING like the homework or ANY practice provided. The "practice questions" uploaded are literally just random tests from DIFFERENT econ classes from the past so its not even relevant course material. The amount of time and effort I spent on this class is unbelievable considering I will probably never ever use it again in my life.

Someone said "the professor wasn't as bad as the reviews said he was." That's 100% true. He was far, far, far worse.

I took this class online/asynchronously, which is already a terrible format for a course like this. From the very first week, Professor Zame's lecture videos, slides, and homework assignments were replete with endless mistakes and typos that actually hinder your understanding of the material. These mistakes and typos only got worse throughout the duration of the quarter to the point where the night before the weekly homework was due, he was sending out emails to correct it.

This level of incompetency in his instruction abilities is shocking. Lecture videos are a shitshow and hardly offer anything beyond a basic understanding of the concepts, which means when you go to start the homework you're utterly lost. The slides are fairly useless and filled with so many mistakes and obscure concepts and formulas that they become almost unusable by themselves. The TA's did 99, if not 100% of the teaching in this course.

Zame's disorganization knows no bounds. On the DAY OF the final, there was still a lack of clarity in whether certain concepts would be covered in the final or not. The format of the final, and midterm, is horrendous for remote instruction as well. Because each question is a large compound question worth 20-30 points, a minor algebraic mistake will cost you practically every point in that problem, even if your methodology was correct. Since you don't show your work on examinations and only write the final answer.

The scope of this course is strange as well. In addition to consumer and production theory, the last few weeks of the class involved a substantial amount of game theory and statistics, including solving for competitive equilibrium, investment risk aversion, and probability problems.

This professor flooded my inbox with 122 emails over the course of 10 weeks. He seems to have enough time to send all those emails but couldn't find the time to focus on building a proper course. I understand that Zame is a notable graduate professor of economics, but if you don't plan on pursuing economics beyond the undergraduate level, you will quickly turn to the bottle to cope with the absolute retardation that permeates Econ 11 with Zame.

Writing this because I honestly think this professor isn't so bad like the reviews that were given. I did have a little difficult time in this class mainly because his slides weren't organized and they were full of typos. However, it isn't that bad because the exams were fair and similar to the homework. If you can do the homework, you'll be able to do the exam no problem.
Yes, his slides and lectures maybe confusing, but at least he's a very nice and caring professor. His lectures may get a little dry and boring, but that's just how econ is. If you go into his OH, you will know he is a kind professor.
To ace this class, simply do the homework for practice and go to TA sections for more clarification on class material! :)
For the math part, it really isn't intense math. It's just simple integrals and derivatives that everyone should know how to solve! I've only taken up to math 31B and I did pretty well in the class

I had low expectations going into this class with Zame because of his past reviews, but after finishing the class, he honestly isn't that bad. His lectures were pretty unclear, but it seems like he's trying his best but is just not the best at explaining concepts. Grade was based on one midterm, final, and weekly homework, which was a blessing because we were allowed to work with others on the homework and even ask TAs for help, making it easy to get 100s which really helped my grade. Some problems on the homework were easy while some were super difficult, but it helped prepare me for the midterm and final which were identical to the homework. His exams were really fair, and even though I didn't do amazing on the exams he applies a pretty generous curve at the end of the course which I was really thankful for.

I'm a CS major who have taken MATH 32A so the calculation of this class was pretty easy. However, the material of this class was FULL OF MISTAKES!!! You can still find (sometimes major) mistakes on the PROOFREAD slides, homework, and even solutions, and it seems that people don't really care about it. It's really annoying to learn with the material you cannot fully trust. : (
The content of this class is not hard and the problem sets are definitely doable. When it comes to Competitive Market, where problems get a little bit complicated, TAs will go over sufficient examples for you and you will know how to deal with them.
Since prof Zame basically reads of his slides, you may need help from your TA . I highly recommend Jay, who is absolutely approachable and patient. Go to his review sessions and discussions if you need!
The grading of this class is generous. I got 10/10 for all weekly problem sets expect one (9/10), 100/100 for midterm and 88% for final but I still got a solid A.

I’m not an Econ major student, but I got an A+. Zame is definitely not an organized person. He often has typos in his slides, and his slides are not so organized too. However, the course itself is not difficult. The tests are easy if you know how to do the homework. Sometimes the homework can go crazy, and you need to spend much time on it. Overall, the course is fine.

This class was arguably one of the worst prerequisites I’ve taken for the Business Economics major. Its reputation for being a difficult weeder course is definitely accurate, and Professor Zame in particular didn’t make the experience any less painful, although he is very knowledgeable. :(

The class was completely recorded after the first few weeks and homework is due every week with one chosen problem that is graded. The TA sections and their office hours (especially Jay and Ryan) were the only reason I passed this class with an A, so definitely take advantage of that if you choose this course. They basically broke down the professor’s lectures so that I could actually attempt to do the homework.

The midterm and final were similar to the homework, if not slightly easier and less convoluted (which often consisted of problems that were nowhere near the level of material we learned in lecture). However, the midterm was definitely not structured well because getting one question wrong meant losing about 10 points since we only submitted an answer sheet without partial credit for our work. But since the final is worth 50% of your grade, and the curve is super generous, this class wasn’t too bad of a gpa killer.

I would not recommend this class unless you’re prepared to put in a lot of work and self study.