Just a brief post and a promise to start blogging again soon (should anyone, actually, ever read this).
Class participation grades have been a topic of much discussion among my classmates. Depending on the course, class participation can make up as much as 30% of your final grade - but it's typically around 20%.
The promise of easy marks hasn't been enough to motivate a lot of my classmates to actually talk in class. Perhaps 20% doesn't look very important. But the key isn't the % of the overall grade, it's the variability too.
What you find in a lot of courses is that there is very little variability in exam and assignment scores - mainly because they're quite easy and your classmates work pretty hard - whereas there is huge variability in class participation scores. If you make a decent comment per class, you end up somewhere near full marks - if you're absent and/or don't say anything you often score zero.
What this means is even though participation looks like a relatively small fraction, actually it can account for an awful lot of the final variation in grades. Put your hand up and say something, it's not that hard and it might make the difference on your transcript...
02/06/2010
05/01/2010
"The end of the affair?" - it's only just getting started...
I came across this article: "The end of the affair: Falling out of love with business" in The Economist recently and, frustrated by being too late to comment on that site, I thought I would explain why I couldn't disagree with it more.
Far from the downturn being the end of the love affair with business, what it showed at least in the UK was how in the last 10 years ignorance and apathy about business have grown out of all proportion, and just how damaging this has been for the UK economy. The public sector in the UK has grown out of control, with by some estimates well over 50% of the country living off the public purse. Anecdotally bright young graduates from all fields have been piling into "self-actualising" professions like medicine or the charity sector.
They in turn left the grubby business of creating value, engaging in basic capitalism to an unsupervised few, who with access to the purse strings of government by virtue of tax revenues and political contributions, were able to ensure they remained ridiculously under-regulated.
TV shows like the Apprentice bastardise and simplify the mechanics of real business into digestible portions to the nation of business-agnostics whose only idea of generating wealth is to get on the property ladder or wait for their parents to die.
I say the lessons of the downturn are to invest serious funds into the teaching of business studies in schools, and end the progressive socialisation of the UK.
Far from the downturn being the end of the love affair with business, what it showed at least in the UK was how in the last 10 years ignorance and apathy about business have grown out of all proportion, and just how damaging this has been for the UK economy. The public sector in the UK has grown out of control, with by some estimates well over 50% of the country living off the public purse. Anecdotally bright young graduates from all fields have been piling into "self-actualising" professions like medicine or the charity sector.
They in turn left the grubby business of creating value, engaging in basic capitalism to an unsupervised few, who with access to the purse strings of government by virtue of tax revenues and political contributions, were able to ensure they remained ridiculously under-regulated.
TV shows like the Apprentice bastardise and simplify the mechanics of real business into digestible portions to the nation of business-agnostics whose only idea of generating wealth is to get on the property ladder or wait for their parents to die.
I say the lessons of the downturn are to invest serious funds into the teaching of business studies in schools, and end the progressive socialisation of the UK.
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