Williamson-like critique

ECON 490 'The Economics of Organizations' was the first 400-level economics class I have ever taken. This class is very unique because it has unfamiliar rules to me which are different than other classes. There are two rules 1) attendance is not required and 2) deadlines are soft. I think these rules have some pros and cons, not too much on one side. Also, I have been in the class where attendance is not required but not the class where deadlines are soft. So this class was somewhat unique class to me.

To begin with, attendance is very important part in the class because students engage and learn more when they come to class and interact. By coming to class on regular basis, student demonstrates how diligent and are willing to effort into class. However, as students go to college, attending class does not become compulsory but students rather attend class voluntarily. Required attendance does have some benefits such as making students focus on class materials and give them opportunity to interact with other students by class activities. People think that requiring students to attend class force them to listen to the lecturer and definitely learn something. However, keeping students inside the classroom does not always mean that education has high quality or have something to learn that is valuable or meaningful. To produce meaningful outcome to students and lecturers, the quality of the class should be meet first, then students will come to class spontaneously. Therefore, I think not-required attendance is a good rule for many students (also for me) because I have a freedom to choose whether I will choose to go to the lecture and listen to the lecturer. To be honest, I can say that I did not attend all lecture but I was be able to learn and obtain all the class materials easily on class website whenever I missed the class. It was very helpful that my instructor posted all the class materials such as powerpoint slides or videos and it was very easy to access and learn by myself. I also realized that many students seem to miss the class after few weeks of the class. I know it is an early class and when attendance is not required, they want to miss the class. Not requiring attendance surely had impact on the attendance rate but I don't think that is a bad thing since if students don't understand or want to learn more, they will come to class and engage actively.

Second rule, deadlines are soft, is another one to discuss because it is very interesting rule that not many class have. Deadline is another important part in the class, and even in the school, because it is a promise between professor and students and missing deadline means breaking a promise. Also, meeting deadlines is an expectation for myself and to others. Certain deadlines avoid any unnecessary delays and enable to manage your own time. However, this class had soft deadlines and I think it had some benefits that hard deadlines can never have. Unlike hard deadlines, soft deadlines allow students to work on more if time is needed. Because you are not forced to submit or finish work on specific time or date, if you need more time to study, understand, or discuss, you are free to do that to make a better outcome. I was able to learn and find more class materials to understand fully and finish my homework with soft deadlines. I don't know how other students work with soft deadlines, but I think it definitely has a merit. However, soft deadlines may put a whole schedule at a risk or put some burden on professor because he would have to check often for submitted works and give feedback. I found soft deadlines very helpful academically, but I thought that it could possibly make students procrastinate. 

I love all these rules in class but if I have to give an advice for an improvement, I would suggest that even though we have soft deadlines, we should have a specific date (maybe 2~3 day after the deadline shown) to submit finally. Because students may put off works and not care about deadlines at all, if you set the date to turn in assignments or blog posts finally, it would help students to realize the importance of due date and not procrastinate. Also, I think not requiring attendance is great because if students do not understand or willing to learn more, they will come to class voluntarily and lecturer doesn't have to get stress on attendance rate. But if you want to increase the attendance rate, you can give some extra credit if students come to class. I am taking ECON 303 right now and professor is giving extra credit i-clicker questions in lecture. Some students miss the class because attendance is not required, but because of extra credit, not many students miss the class.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanDecember 4, 2019 at 8:49 AM

    Thanks for the comments. Regarding both of these, there is some life lesson that needs to be learned and I wonder if you've considered this. For example, consider voting in elections. Going to the polling place, waiting in line to vote, and then actually voting take some time so there is an opportunity cost to it. Further, informing yourself about the candidates and the issues also takes time. And in anything but a local election, your individual vote is not likely to matter in that the outcome of who won the election would be the same whether you voted or not. So the incentives cut against any one individual voting. But the democracy wouldn't be strong at all if most people opted out of voting. There is one country I know of (Australia) where voting is mandatory. Elsewhere, the democracy works if individuals feel a responsibility to vote, regardless of the (dis)incentives.

    The question is whether that same sense of responsibility can be developed regarding going to class and submitting coursework in a timely fashion. If you read the posts by the students who talk the course in years past, they argued that the habits developed in college this way carry over to the workplace. To the extent that is true, students who pushed the limits of these rules, may have done a disservice to themselves. On the other hand, it may be that such a sense of responsibility requires maturity and the students are still developing that way.

    At the beginning of the semester I presented Akerlof's model of Labor Markets as Partial Gift Exchange. For that model to work, the employees need to have that sense of responsibility. In some way, an incentive based alternative will develop because that sense of responsibility isn't there. We don't do character education explicitly in college. But it is there in the background. I'm reluctant to have more rules because then - somebody else makes the decision on behalf of the students. I think students should make these decisions themselves.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gift Exchange

After reading three articles, I think all three articles are trying to explain and demonstrate that every people are caring towards each other. But when there is an increase in competition(demand) and decrease in supply, one tends to think in one's shoes and try to satisfy one's own desires. Human being's nature is to protect oneself and earn benefit by caring and helping out others. I found all three articles interesting and I could relate various concepts such as altruism and fairness in articles to my experiences. Altruism by definition is the unselfish acts to better the well-being of others disregarding the well-being of self. Altruism, gift exchange is voluntary act because people do not expect anything in return but do a favor for others. One of experiences that I could relate to altruism is my experience with TACS team. TACS (Tax Advisors for Champaign Society) is a volunteer team which helps people to report taxes. TACS is the registered student organization with
Read more

Illinibucks

If the Campus gave out each student an allocation of "Illinibucks" which could be used for sole purpose of moving to the head of the line, there would be various benefits and problems at the same time. University has many systems that are priority basis or first-come-first-serve basis. I think both basis have different pros and cons, but I like priority basis better when it comes to academic areas. People might complain about things that are based on priority, but it definitely has some good sides and if Illinibucks beome a thing, many people would think the same way I think. There are a lot of classes to choose and take in U of I and people value every classes differently. As a Statistics major, at the time of registration, I want to register specific stat courses that I want to learn about. Also, there are some courses that are interesting to me or some gen-eds that I am required to take. Usually, registration is based on priority basis: grade, honors, and major. Usually,
Read more

Simon Kuznets

Image
Simon Kuznets (1901~1985) was an American economist and statistician who is best known for his studies of national income and its components. Prior to World War I, measures of GNP were rough guesses, at best. No government agency collected data to compute GNP, and no private economic researcher did so systematically, either. Kuznets changed all that. With work that began in the 1930s and stretched over decades, Kuznets computed national income back to 1869. He broke it down by industry, by final product, and by use. He also measured the distribution of income between rich and poor. He has another best known works which is Kuznets curve, hypothesizing that industrializing nations experience a rise and subsequent decline in income inequality. He thought economic inequality would increase as rural labor migrated to the cities, keeping wages down as workers competed for jobs. However, since Kuznets postulated this theory in the 1970s, income inequality has increased in advanced develo
Read more