An Example from IPPT on How to Get First Class Honours in Economics

An Example from IPPT on How to Get First Class Honours in Economics

Alright, today I am going to write about an example from IPPT, on how to get first class honours in economics, or for that matter, how to get first class honours in most majors at NUS in general anyways.

[This is in reference to the original, specific article I wrote a few months back which was the most popular article of all my writings: obviously, simply, and very aptly titled: How to Get First Class Honours at NUS. People apparently liked that more than religion, science, mentalism, magic, psychology, and other magical intellectual hobbies of mine.]

I've been receiving a lot of emails on that post, with people asking me about how to get first class and other related topics about academics, on how to study, how to do well in exams, and all that kind of thing. And so I've decided to "pander" to my readers and write a single illustrative story, which, when understood, will help you gain insights into performing better for tests and exams in general, and will definitely contribute to you getting first class. It's all in the moral.

It's a moral that we all know but need to reminded here and there, and now and then.

Most likely if you're a good friend of mine you've heard this story a million times, and I apologise in advance.

I was training for the IPPT some time back, and in any case had been passing it ever since I left full time National Service. However, for one reason or another, during that one particular period, I had a string of failures in a row, and my birthday was fast approaching.

This was weird - my training routine hadn't changed, and I was doing the same methods which had gotten me the "pass" incentives, so what was going on? (I ended up in RT for that year, by the way, so there's a poem I wrote on Eye Pee Pee Tee. Pity!)

I trained every day, and yet was going nowhere. I just "couldn't hit the cow's backside with a banjo".

One day, my brother happened to pass me by to take a phone call, when he saw me doing push ups. When he was done with his call, he told me what the problem was.

I'll try to recreate this, it was some time back: "Hey man, what are you doing?" he asked.

I said, "Pushups! To train for chin ups. I'm going to do 40, like when I passed the last round."

He said, "That's not how you do it! You're just going through the motions. You have to squeeze the back muscles, and use this part, and that part..." and he promptly jumped to the floor and did it, the "proper way".

"Doing 20 proper push ups is better than doing 40 rubbish ones," he intoned severely. "You didn't do it like that last time, when you were younger, anyways," he said, "You'd do all the exercises properly rather than as if they were chores and you had to rush through them."

That was it! Voila!

To cut a long story short, I passed my IPPT that year, after doing the first phase of RT. I got the point of the story, and it's stayed with me ever since. It's something we all know but we don't do.

It's the same with IPPT and it's the same with studying for Economics examinations.

The moral is this: when we train for IPPT with passing in mind, we don't just do the training half heartedly, or just do it for the sake of doing it. We will exert maximum effort. We will make sure the part of the muscles we are training get the full brunt of the effort. To put it one way, if you're doing the bicep-curl at the gym - you make sure it's the biceps that are doing the work and you're not swinging your arm up and down to make use of momentum.

Same goes for studying, and especially for Economics.

I am pretty sure that most of my classmates learnt the same things as I did in Economics class, but they didn't get the first class because they just couldn't score in the examinations. CAP was the main problem. Why?

[I'm generalising here. Not all were like that, of course.] They could do the tutorials because they copied them from their classmates. Some of them formed study groups, but didn't really, really study. They went through the motions in class, and only parroted what the lecture notes said. They sat in classes and daydreamed. Some of them read their materials and took it face value. Some of them dropped out of economics in their third year with a pass or merit degree. Some made it to honours year by smarts.

So when it came to answering thinking questions in the exams, or answering harder questions, they all got murdered.

Here's the attitude of the first class student:

How can I do the tutorial, by myself? What are the mistakes that I have made here? What are the different methods? If I don't know, who knows? Who can I ask? Let me try this again. What can I do?

Let's take a simple case, profit maximisation.

What are the different methods of solving this? The first is to use a graphical method. The second is to use the Lagrangian method. The third is to use the constrained to unconstrained method.

A good student will know this and apply this. An average kid will stick to one method and use it all the time. The poor student didn't even know about the various techniques. But what about the first class student?

The first class student will know the various assumptions behind why it is like that; what assumptions need to hold before the FOCs can be taken like that. He will also know which method is quicker for various questions, because he practised them already, over and over again. He can use the various methods at will - and understands the logic of the various methods. He might even know the preference ordering theory, WARP, the various mathematical conditions of monotonicity and continuously differentiable indifference curves, and all that kind of stuff behind the simple idea of profit maximisation. In other words, he doesn't take this for granted. He checks things out, he learns more than what lies on the surface, and he is interested in his studies.

So the moral of the story is, to get first class honours, it's all about the way you approach the subject.

It is not purely about raw hours you put in; in those hours did you really understand the subject and get the logic, memorise the steps, do the problems, try exam questions, look at textbook problems, and work them all out yourself, using various methods, and cross checking your solutions when using different methods or approaches?

Or did you spend those study hours talking with friends, chatting, doing only tutorial questions, and basically going through the motions of real, diligent, hard work? Or did most of the work, but when the hard questions came by, you ignored them or left them blank? I think the moral of the story is quite clear!

Hope you liked the moral of the story. Good luck with IPPT if you came by because of that; good luck with your studies and examinations if you came by thanks to the "Get First Class Honours in Economics" :) :) Thanks for reading and cheers.

PS Yeah, I pander to my readers sometimes. I admit! But here we call it demand-and-supply curves.

Anything that interests me!

Are you in the USP? Do you study History or Economics at NUS?

Are you in the USP? Do you study History or Economics at NUS? Are you a freshman/ freshie?

This post is for you :)

Q and A

I usually write to the people who ask me for advice or write on my comment tagboard. Mostly, I get all sorts of interesting comments, questions and ideas, and very nice ones, too! However, since I notice that recently most people have been asking me about USP, Economics and History, this post is dedicated to freshmen/ freshies/ new students at NUS or anyone who happens to pass by and indicates some passing interest. I also note that it's near CORS bidding time that they send me this very interesting deluge of emails. It's fine :)

[As an aside, I feel a "warm glow" or "impure altruism" or maybe even some kind of happiness when I help others by sharing my experiences or my knowledge, not just solely because of advice on this blog, but also when I share my travel experiences or German studies programme. I think it makes blogging such an interesting enterprise - you get to help people while you do your thing/ what you like. Beautiful, isn't it?]

Most Economics juniors of mine came to read this article "How to Get First Class Honours in Economics at NUS" or "How to Study Econometrics 1" or "How to Study Econometrics 2/ Rebuttals to some comments". Others just came to me because they know me already. I summarise those articles basically here, in a single post, as that might help you:

How to Get First Class Honours in Economics

for more details, see actual article

How does one get a first class honours in Economics at NUS? I wrote that I've absolutely no idea. But here are some things that I did, and those can maybe inspire you.

1. You have to be willing to work long and hard. I mean long hours and hard work. Long hours: I spent almost five to twelve hours in the Central Library every day - on top of lectures and tutorials. Hard work: for instance, for Econometrics - a bane of existence for most undergraduates unless they're math majors - I did the entire textbook... at least thrice.

2. You need to get help for mathematics and statistics. Unless you're a math major or a stats major, it is very likely that you're in my position - you know some math and some stats, but you can't seem to prove the Stolper-Samuelson theorem or Rybczynski theorem. I mean, even though I did the module and once knew how to do to the Rybczynski theorem by heart, it was thanks to getting good help from my trusty friend, Roastbird. He helped me out also for Econometrics 2 - a killer module. Get help from real mathematicians or real statisticians! We're economists.

3. You need to get friends. This is related to point 2, but point 2 is about the importance of mathematics and statistics and how your A level math or whatever isn't going to give you any advantage. Friends on the other hand... help you with tutorials, help you with lectures, lend you materials, give you heads-up... what else can I say? Get economics friends! Quod erat demonstrandum.

4. You need to get a good supervisor, and start working early on your thesis. This is because in NUS you need to get an A- or better for your thesis to get first class honours, on top of a sterling CAP. These are self evident arguments above, so I won't explain further. Finding a good supervisor and a good thesis topic are all topics that can take up entire posts or even entire blogs!

5. You need luck. I am entitled to hindsight bias, and thus can say my all time favourite (and many of my friends either hear this from my mouth or label me as such) "I'm a genius". Hahaha! How nice if that were true. However, I'll have to be really honest with you and say that luck plays a small but significant role.

How to Study Econometrics 1

1. No one actually knows how to study econometrics and do well at it. I've searched the whole Net and asked countless people. That's why I am attempting to answer the almighty question for students worldwide: "How the heck do I study Econometrics well and do well in Econometrics exams?"

2. But there are indeed things that you can do to study Econometrics and do well at it in examinations :)

3. The question fields/ sets are limited, so these are the fields that you need to know and master:

probability, statistics, matrices, linear regression and other regression models (e.g. log-log, log-linear, linear-log, quadratic, and know what the differences are, what the intepretations are, and what the similarities are)

4. You should do questions every day. The thing is that the field is limited, but the questions are vast in number.

5. Theoretically, you can learn the equations and formulae, then practise questions related to them. That is the best option, but the thing is: Your teacher didn't give you easy equations right? He also didn't give you questions related to those right?

I know, I was there. So the point 4, which is more general, holds. Do questions every day. You can actually learn the formulae and then apply them, but at higher levels, this method will not work. So just try to practise.

6. MATRICES turn out to be so important, but I didn't know that before. But now you do. To study Econometrics well, you definitely need more than a passing command of Matrices - you need to learn all the hard terms and methods immediately!

7. You need to learn a lot of important and hard words like heteroskedasticity, homoskedasticity, linear regression, multivariate normal distributions, variances, standard deviations, means, modes, medians, and more. Your command of esoteric language in the weird realm of Econometrics will improve. You have to know all that in order to do well, because questions routinely have those terms:

e.g. "According to the Gauss Markov theorems, with i.i.d., BLA BLA BLA?"

E.g. Do you know the law of iterated expectations?

8. Even though Econometrics is tough, you can study Econometrics if you have the motivation and persistence.

9. Mathematics will be your friend and your neighbour. The good thing is, that when we study Econometrics, we unlike Mathematicians, do not need to have formal rigid proofs, but we can do easier stuff than they do. I know, I know, it looks Greek to everyone (which it is - most of the symbols are Greek!) but trust me, when you study Econometrics you learn hard stuff that is easier than what pure mathematicians do. So there. We have it good, in that sense.

10. To get the highest marks, get into your teacher's good books and get a lot of practice.

How to Study Econometrics 2 (Quek DF 2008/2009)

1. Complete proofs.

2. Learn the individual parts and then bring them all together.

3. Practise the problem sets.

4. Understanding truly, and real learning is better than getting the form right - i.e. don't do my performance method; use Quek's real learning method.

5. Know your lecturer.

I also answer some other questions that were posed to me, via email or via the tagboard or via face to face interaction:

Should I go for the USP?

I strongly recommend the USP for good students. Good students are defined as those students who are already experts in at least one academic field, like to read, think through issues and are articulate or eloquent. The USP will teach you how to synthesise knowledge and how to write academic articles and academic, maybe even journal standard, papers. Basically you get very good academic training and you can learn cross subject, interdisciplinary subjects that are very interesting.

Warning: not all USP students are good students though, as some get eliminated halfway through the course. You will most likely require a CAP of above 3.5 just to stay in, and must be on an honours programme (3 years' degree = no USP certificate).

Should I do Economics?

Do you love maths? Do you know a lot of statistics? Believe in drawing graphs, running regressions on computer programmes, or writing esoteric materials? Then economics at university is your cup of tea, I kid you not.

On a more serious note, if you like Economics or did it successfully before or think that you can see a future career in it, such as in government or in the private sector, go right ahead. It is known as the queen of the social sciences because of its difficulty though!

Is behavioural economics mathematical?

All of economics is mathematical. But behavioural is largely empirical or experimental based, so it is more statistical in nature rather than mathematical. Basic statistics is needed.

Yet at the same time, behavioural is more qualitative and verbally argumentative rather than being like microeconomics or macroeconomics. If you like writing or arguing or reading academic papers, there's absolutely no problem! Should be very fun; I recommend it - well, I did it after all. You can read about behavioural on my blog - use the links on the right if you can!

Is Basant scary?

YES!!! Basant is very scary!!! I got a B for his module, EC4102 - GOD SAVE THOSE WHO DO HIS MODULE!!! God save you. You will need divine help!

I like him, by the way. He's quite an interesting chap! But he is very strict and - dare I say it - old school!!!

Should I do philo or economics?

YM, I told you already!

Development Economics?

Verbal based rather than mathematical - I should say do it only if you're good at reading and writing, and exploring various themes. A basic grounding of economic history or basic development economics should be useful in doing EC4371. I did it under Shin at NUS, and learnt verbal models of heteroeconomics that challenged monoeconomics.

Economic History?

Hard to do an ISM on Economic History at NUS, but easy to do at LSE, UOM and Cambridge. Reason is that - there aren't many economic historians at NUS! There are several, including a self-styled contemporary economic historian (Shin), but they are fewer than DGE model theorists and empirical, applied economists and econometricians.

Good luck, my juniors! All the best!

Anything that interests me!

Tyler Cowen's Make Him Fight Dragons Applied

Tyler Cowen's Make Him Fight Dragons Applied

OK, I have been meaning to write (I mean "right") this for a long time. I had a talk with an acquaintance - I mean, friend - of mine and she had told me about her dream man. 

I say "dream man" advisedly; after all, a dream isn't real, and the man she was telling me about wasn't real at all.

Now I had put the conversation behind me (it was a fortnight ago!) and was going about my normal, everyday life when I read Tyler Cowen's "Discover Your Inner Economist". Well, of course, I read economics books - I have an Economics degree, remember? 

The thing is that you might wonder what a talk with a friend about her dream man and Tyler Cowen's book have in common. 

The key thing is signalling.

Although some may argue that economists have absolutely no right to go around poking their noses in affairs of the heart and relationships, Cowen rightly points out that it is all a matter of signalling. People are constantly signalling to each other and in the case of dating it is particularly and obviously, well, obvious.

Cowen calls the particular approach of advertising clearly and specifically the qualities that a woman wants in a man the "Make Him Fight Dragons" approach. This is a direct kind of signalling rather than the more indirect and surreptitious kind of signalling that we are used to in daily life. Basically, the woman tells her potential suitors all her requirements and then the men self-select. In other words, the men can see what kind of man she wants, and then they have to decide if they can take such a huge "dose" (I plagiarise here) of her.

Now, what's that got to do with my friend? She goes around telling everybody about her dream guy she wants to marry. I recorded down the qualities because I was flabbergasted - I mean wonderfully amazed - at her specificity. 

This is one girl who appears to know what she wants (although I am pretty sure she doesn't really know what she wants).

MLQH's dream man:

1. He must share her goals and beliefs.

2. He must be of the same religion (she is Pentecostalian/"rabid Protestantish"/ she's from New Creation Church).

3. He must be rich or have the potential to become incredibly wealthy.

4. He cannot have had girlfriends before.

5. He must be a virgin.

6. He cannot be shorter than her (and my friend in question is at least 1.64m)

7. He cannot criticise her.

8. He must be absolutely honest with her.

9. He must drive.

10. He cannot be younger but also cannot be more than 5 years older.

11. He doesn't smoke.

12. He must be self made (i.e. not reliant on parents or inheritance).

13. He isn't insecure or clingy.

14. He must be able to interact with her professors (and she is going to be a PhD holder in the nursing and medical care profession!!!).

15. He must be educated to at least a first degree level.

16. He must be of the same wavelength as her.

17. He must wine and dine her and pay for all dates.

18. Above all, he must pay for their matrimonial home and all their expenses when married.

19. All these he does willingly.

Now, I am a really sporting man and would like to wager on this one. 

The man here doesn't exist - my friend seems to have taken Cowen's idea of Making Him Fight Dragons to the extreme.

Let us assume as a simplifying assumption that in the general world population, each of the above conditions has a 50% probability, or 0.5. You'd agree with me that this is merely a simplifying condition as not half of all men smoke, and certainly less than 50% of the men in the world have at least a first degree, not 50% of all the men on earth are wealthy, and so on and so forth. Also, as a specific case, it is highly unrealistic that half the men in the world are between 0 and 5 years older than my friend. Thus, this simplifying assumption serves as a maximum, upper bound of how many men worldwide are likely to fulfil her conditions.

Let us also further assume that the dream man, the inamorato, the ideal man is willing to marry her with a 50% probability and that he is neither gay, nor bisexual, nor a celibate priest, nor married already, nor someone who does not want to marry. Two more conditions (he "wants her", and he is "eligible"), each with a 0.5 chance as per my earlier assumption.

OK, since these conditions must hold simultaneously, this means that the probability of finding this dream man (upper bound) is: 0.5 to the power of 21, which works out to be 0.000000476. The world population is currently about 6.6 billion, and let's just assume that half of them are men - so that makes 3.3 billion men (but bear in mind that some of them are still children and some of them are geriatrics). This makes her scope 1573 possible men! If the probability drops to 0.4 for each condition, her scope drops to 14 men. If it drops to 0.3 for each condition, there are 0 men. I really don't fancy her chances.

However, Cowen does suggest another method, called the Honey Trap method. Aha, this one seems more promising. The method goes something like this: attract as many men as possible and interview, review and select those that seem nice, fit your qualities, etc, etc. The problem with the Fighting Dragons method is that if the conditions are too stringent, it puts off possible eligible knights who conclude that it is too difficult to rescue the damsel; they'd rather go for the Honey Trap and take their chances against other guys instead. Maybe my friend should try that.

Interesting material. Anyways, finally - I've got it off my chest.

PS If you're interested in dating my friend, do be sure that you fulfil all her criteria and that you are either in palliative care, medicine or some nursing research field. And she is one rough, tough cookie!

Anything that interests me!

Anything that interests me - Behavioural Economics

Anything that interests me - Behavioural Economics

I am back! 

It's been a long four years of education here and I'm about to graduate and leave university. 

On Wednesday, I even went down to sign the contract with my employer about the date I shall start work. 

So for the moment it looks like my formal education is almost over, unless of course I manage to get the Master's scholarship, in which case, my formal education will be over next year in 2011 instead. 

In any case, I decided to let this post be a reflection of what I've learnt in behavioural economics, one very interesting and controversial subfield in Economics.

Let's try a few isolated points that I find interesting. 

People don't integrate their assets, but rather use different mental accounting rules to make decisions on gambles and their money. Isn't that curious?

It's curious because most people would say "duh", but economists think that you shouldn't bother about various mental accounts, since it's the total sum of wealth (the whole thing) that you should be concerned with. 

Also, most people think differently from economists about the topic of inflation. Isn't that curious?

It's curious because economists (especially Lucas, who came up with the Misperceptions Model) believe that people do know the models that economists use. 

However, in real life, people don't think the same way as economists do. In fact, most of the time, in real life people behave rather differently from the way traditional economists think they should behave. The key point, as my Professor used to say, was that the deviation is constant or measurable. In other words, they should deviate from traditional or classical economics in a predictable way.  

Next, people suffer from "money illusion" - they tend to, broadly, see nominal increases as very important when they should be bothering about real increases. Isn't that curious?

It's curious because the same people can work out that inflation reduces what they can actually buy with a given sum of money. 

However, the same people are overjoyed when their income rises less than inflation does. Consider this example:

Inflation 10%

Wage increase 10%

Real increase 0% (because the wage increase just offsets inflation)

Yet it turns out that people would be happier in the above case relative to the next case:

Inflation 2%

Wage increase 3%

Real increase 1% (because the wage increase is more than the inflation)

The list goes on and on. So bear with me for two more examples.

People procrastinate. Isn't that curious?

It's curious because it means that people are not time consistent and they are not maximising their utility... or is it? 

The thing is that the present moment has a saliency that traditional standard economics ignores. 

Self 1 of a person wishes to do his homework at period 2, but when period 2 comes, it now becomes the present. Again, he wishes to postpone doing the homework till period 3, and so on. (Interesting stuff - but simplified to fit inside this academic blog.)

I think the best part about the course that struck me was the part on happiness.

There's a hedonic treadmill, and there's a satisfaction treadmill. Treadmill effects are basically effects that wear off, much like a treadmill that keeps going backwards as you are running forwards. You keep on running, but you don't really get anywhere - precisely because it's a treadmill.

A hedonic treadmill means that people don't seem to get any happier because they adapt to happiness levels. As they get richer, they don't get any happier because now it takes much more leisure or things or enjoyment to make them happier. They adapt and get used to the better lifestyle. That's a hedonic treadmill.

On the other hand, a satisfaction treadmill implies that people don't seem to get any happier because of changing aspirations. That means that as people get richer, their aspirations change. What used to make them happy is not enough now. You can see that the reverse is also true. The satisfaction treadmill also suggests that as people break their limbs or become incredibly poor, their aspiration levels are lowered, and hence they don't need as much to make them happy when they're paralysed or poor. Some kind of aspirational or goal change occurs.

Interesting stuff eh?

An interesting, and related, idea is that happiness is found in the moment, yet happiness can also be memory-based and remembered.

Here is where behavioural economics seems akin to philosophy.

Do we remember - mind the pun - to fully immerse ourselves in the moment and feel happy when we are on holiday, or do we keep on taking pictures to reminisce upon our holiday later?

Are we busy enjoying the moment when we savour food, or are we constantly thinking of how happy we were eating that burger yesterday or how happy we are going to be eating that burger later?

Cool stuff. 

Now I get back to studying for my degree.

Anything that interests me! :)