Sac's: How have you gone?, Are you enjoying Eco?

[maine]

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.

[mtwtfss]

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.

[nbalakers24]

you can do uni economics?

[mtwtfss]

Yes.

[nbalakers24]

what university?

[jerry]

both melbourne and monash offer it I think

[mtwtfss]

Correct.

[AppleXY]

just fyi, uni microecon is completely different to vce econ. And I really mean completely different.

Maybe only 5% is actually useful lol.

[ReVeL]

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.

[AppleXY]

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.

[ReVeL]

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

[AppleXY]

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. 

[Collin Li]

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...

[jag]

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

[cardiovascular]

almost half my class failed the second eco sac