A few points I had wanted to make but forgot to/ran out of time

These are really for down the road and I know you are keyed into finals now.  But they are something for you to consider.

1.  Some students in their last post discussed how much time they put into doing the homework.  There is the issue of what doing the homework means.  I believe most students interpret it as getting the assignment done so it can be submitted.  A different interpretation (and the one I'd prefer) is to produce a reasonably deep understanding of the topic being addressed in the assignment.  The second interpretation requires greater time.  How much additional time depends on the particular topic and what the student already knows.  There is no fixed relationship between time put in and generating a deep understanding of the subject, though I'm sure you get better at doing it with practice.  Most students who reported their time input, which I believe they did honestly, had too little time on task to generate a deep understanding, unless the student is a really sharp cookie and knows a lot of this stuff already.

2. Though you had the option to write on something other than the prompt, mostly students didn't try that at all.  There is a question why you didn't.  My tentative answer is that you've been trained to be deferential to authority (me in this case) rather than to pursue your own curiosity.  Part of becoming an adult is about getting a better balance on this, where you drive your own learning more often. The first day of class we asked, who owns the human capital produced in our course?  The answer, of course, is that each of you own your own human capital.  As owners, you are the principals, and I am your agent. Yet you didn't really behave that way.  This also speaks to #1, because writing on your own topic and tying it to the course would require doing some homework, which would certainly take time.  But I wonder if there is a different explanation as well - risk aversion and the fear of failure.  Writing to the prompt is safer, no doubt.  But there is definitely more learning if you fail on occasion and then take lessons from that experience.  The course didn't do much on helping you learn to fail as part of the normal process where eventually you do succeed in mastering something significant.

3.  This one is about math models.  When I was an administrator I found I often would make a simple model of the situation we were dealing with, analyze that, and use it to communicate about the situation and to try to shed some light on the important issues.  This is a personal strength - I'm a pretty good analyst.  I really don't know if undergraduate majors in economics can be expected to do something similar when they've reached a reasonably high level administrative position.  However, I do believe that part of the reason for learning the models that we've considered is to see the implications that arise from the model, rather than just treat the model as a thing in itself.  We've established that none of you are going on to graduate school in economics.  So mastering any particular model probably won't have much value to you down the road.  But having facility with such models in general might be an important life skill and help you climb the ranks of management.  The ability to conceptualize is definitely important and the modeling helps with that.