ATAR Notes: Forum

VCE Stuff => VCE Business Studies => VCE Subjects + Help => VCE Economics => Topic started by: maine on May 06, 2009, 06:28:00 pm

Title: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: maine on May 06, 2009, 06:28:00 pm
Personally, I, so far have gotten a circa 95% and a circa 85% (School doesnt give us exact marks, it's bizarre)
I Am loving eco right now, it's so fascinating, and the knowledge is actually useful.
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: mtwtfss on May 06, 2009, 08:34:06 pm
Yeahh economics is good, regretting not doing uni economics this year as well.

Learnt that you really need to decifer through the crap in the textbooks, really summarise it down to the key points you need to know and ensure you know those like the back of ya hand.
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: nbalakers24 on May 31, 2009, 06:58:52 pm
you can do uni economics?
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: mtwtfss on May 31, 2009, 08:10:22 pm
Yes.
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: nbalakers24 on May 31, 2009, 08:28:27 pm
what university?
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: jerry on May 31, 2009, 08:46:26 pm
both melbourne and monash offer it I think
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: mtwtfss on June 01, 2009, 09:11:19 am
Correct.
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: AppleXY on June 05, 2009, 11:25:49 am
just fyi, uni microecon is completely different to vce econ. And I really mean completely different.

Maybe only 5% is actually useful lol.
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: ReVeL on June 05, 2009, 12:37:51 pm
just fyi, uni microecon is completely different to vce econ. And I really mean completely different.

Maybe only 5% is actually useful lol.

I disagree. Whilst there are significant differences, a fair proportion of it is using the concepts covered in VCE, like Supply & Demand and Opportunity Cost. Just how I've found it anyway.
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: AppleXY on June 05, 2009, 02:15:43 pm
Yeah, I guess the (basic) fundamentals are covered in VCE. But in VCE, we never did Opportunity cost calculations and how you would obtain the higher comparative advantage of them. It's far more quantitative in uni, than in vce.

- We never learned marginality
- We never learned economic surpluses (consumer + producer surpluses)
- We only learnt basic elasticity. We never did cross product elasticity (where a + is substitute and - is a complement)
- We never learnt utility

And those were the first few chapters of our book (principles of economics by bernake (lol) jennings and frank).

Thats why I came to the conclusion that uni (micro)econ completely different, or should I say, more advanced, than VCE econ. :)

Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: ReVeL on June 05, 2009, 02:21:32 pm
Yeah I see what you're saying, theres alot of stuff we didn't cover last year. However, yeah, I thought much of it was built on from what we did in VCE. Definately agree it's far more quantitative though..!

My point is... perhaps a little more then 5% useful :)
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: AppleXY on June 05, 2009, 02:34:28 pm
Yeah I see what you're saying, theres alot of stuff we didn't cover last year. However, yeah, I thought much of it was built on from what we did in VCE. Definately agree it's far more quantitative though..!

My point is... perhaps a little more then 5% useful :)

haha, yeah probs more than 5%. I say, 15% tops. But VCE Econ does certainly lay a solid foundation to build on at uni.  :)
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: Collin Li on June 05, 2009, 06:08:02 pm
My opinion is that university economics teaches the "essence" of economics far better than VCE Economics... at the University of Melbourne, anyway.

I found trying to teach VCE Economics (hence requiring me to learn it), a riddling experience - so many questions were not aimed towards improving an overall understanding of economics.

I wouldn't say university economics is more advanced - not at all. I found it far easier than trying to teach and learn VCE Economics. VCE Economics merely misses the point. As AppleXY pointed out: where are the surplus calculations, and where are the cost-benefit analyses?

A failure to teach the fundamental idea of "utility" is the most evident failure of VCE Economics. I remember Brendan posted a link to some article about some economist critising the board in charge of VCE Economics for excluding welfare analysis - the economist also pointed out there were no economists on the board, and also that their left-wing biases may have erred them away from welfare analysis (since welfare analysis clearly shows that government intervention does more harm than good in a proper market). It may have been the other way around - the fact they didn't know about welfare analysis left them to be far more left-wing than justifiable...
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: jag on June 21, 2009, 01:09:55 am
economics is going fantastic
three sacs so far
94%,97%,94%
i have a really gun teacher tho so i guess that counts
we've done like 10 practice exams just in class
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: cardiovascular on July 02, 2009, 08:06:19 pm
almost half my class failed the second eco sac
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: bosley on July 07, 2009, 12:27:58 am
economics is going fantastic
three sacs so far
94%,97%,94%
i have a really gun teacher tho so i guess that counts
we've done like 10 practice exams just in class

haha

so far my sacs have been 89%, 97%
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: jag on July 08, 2009, 12:22:37 pm
dats gun. keep it up
Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: ReVeL on August 14, 2009, 11:21:43 am
Uni eco is wayyyyy different. I really enjoy and am pretty good at VCE economics, its so new, and interesting, i did it at Uni, but withdrew from it middle of this year :(. It was nothing like what we learn at school, much more on the THEORY and PRINCIPLES behind demand, supply, policies etc. And it was much more heavily mathematical based. *sobs*

So you prefered VCE economics? Interesting..

Personally, I found economics at uni to be much more focused on understanding concepts as opposed to rote learning definitions (I supppose this is common to any VCE subject). After doing a semester of at uni, I feel like I actually understand economics like so much better than I did in my 2 years of VCE. And the maths isn't really that bad...

I much prefer it to VCE, but obviously it's not for everyone!

Title: Re: Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?
Post by: xXNovaxX on August 14, 2009, 01:42:22 pm
Uni eco is wayyyyy different. I really enjoy and am pretty good at VCE economics, its so new, and interesting, i did it at Uni, but withdrew from it middle of this year :(. It was nothing like what we learn at school, much more on the THEORY and PRINCIPLES behind demand, supply, policies etc. And it was much more heavily mathematical based. *sobs*

So you prefered VCE economics? Interesting..

Personally, I found economics at uni to be much more focused on understanding concepts as opposed to rote learning definitions (I supppose this is common to any VCE subject). After doing a semester of at uni, I feel like I actually understand economics like so much better than I did in my 2 years of VCE. And the maths isn't really that bad...

I much prefer it to VCE, but obviously it's not for everyone!



Yeah it was a real shame, but it mgiht have been because of the type of economics i was doing, i later found out there are dozens of "branches" of economics. The maths was okay, nothing majorly difficult to grasp, but it's because i didn't do methods (which is a prerequisite for many Uni's), and also, it had a lot of algebra, and calculations. We weren't allowed a calculator for the exam or tests!!! And sometimes we were dealing with decimals, percentages, and fractions etc, i need the holy calculator :P