ECON 3020

Summary: Good guy, easy class, content meh.

This class gets crazy hate for no reason. McGee does everything in his power to make his students succeed---he's generous with office hours, giving out practice/old exams, and giving practice problems. Yes, lectures are boring, but it's macroeconomics what are you supposed to do. I went to office hours several times and found McGee helpful in answering my questions. The nerdy side of me wishes I would have enjoyed the models more than I did, but again that's not really macro's strong point. The exams were pretty easy and just like the practice exams. One midterm, I got a 89 raw score and it was somehow curved to a 99. Ended up getting an A or A+ on every exam by studying for about 3-4 hours for each. But I know some people studied less and did just as well.

My opinion on this course fluctuated the entire time from the first lecture until the final exam. McGee is a super chill guy and makes the classroom environment pretty relaxed. He makes an effort to add humor in his presentations with quirky made up scenarios about past fed chairs and silly raps about macro policy. That being said, his lectures are not very engaging. It is very easy to become disengaged with what he's saying as he tends to drone on about concepts without really trying to get you to understand them. As the semeseter went on, people decided not to show up to lecture altogether. However, I think it's important to still go to lecture to at least expose yourself for the material that week. For most lectures he will have a handout on the topic for that day which he will solve in class. These handouts are extremely important as they are 90% likely to show up on the midterms and final. Study the handouts, the review questions at the end of slides, and his unique narratives he conveys during the lecture and you will be fine. Don't let the 40% final scare you. All the material comes from the midterms from that semester plus the little amount of content you cover between them and the final. Study these well and you will be prepared. There are no surprises. Overall, McGee is a decent professor to take for intermediate macro. He's not the most engaging lecturer but he tries to make the course as manageable as possible for what it is.

I would definitely say that Professor Mcgee is a good person overall as I could feel it through his speaking and his relative generous grading for some of the exams. However, he is not an organized lecturer and this class overall is not organized at all. Firstly, Professor Mcgee simply throw all the related files, slides, news, handouts, videos on each module on Canvas. There is no classification and the naming of the files is always complex and confusing. So when you want to go over the module or try to study it on your own, it is just hard to have a step-to-step learning process. Instead, you'll probably end up with not knowing what's going on; Secondly, Professor Mcgee's lectures are confusing and always going outside the box. He has slides while he also designs the so-called "handouts", on which there will be several questions that are worded in a very Mcgee-styled way. He rarely sticks to slides but rather spend most of the time simply talking about a concept or a theory and then immediately shifts to the handout and draws several graphs on the board. After that he will stick to the graphs and explore a lot of things that are not on the slides nor on the e-book. The handouts are important, after all, and that's why you need to always go to his lectures and copy down all the graphs while understand his logic. His graphs and logic are different from the ones from the e-book for many times. It's impossible for someone to get a good grade in the exam simply by reading all the slides and book on canvas because you'll not get what he wants.

However, for really smart students, this could be a good course because it has no homework or attendance taken or any bullsh*t group projects. There are only exams and exams only. So if you get to go to the lectures regularly, like once per week, while making sure you understand all the handouts by talking to Mcgee and know what he wants in the exam, I would say you'll get an A with the least annoying tasks comparing to other courses. I managed to get an A at the end of the semester but it is mostly because professor Mcgee was going chill on the final exam and he was grading generously.

In short, professor is a good person but the course itself is a pain in the ass.

This course was really, really annoying but it might be the right fit for you. Pretty much the only grades in this class were the 3 midterms and 1 final. The dutch knockout is really generous and saved me. McGee is an absolutely horrible lecturer. He is disorganized, confusing, boring, and constantly goes on tangents. Going to lecture only makes me even more confused and generally lost. The only way to be successful in this class is spend upwards of 12-14 hours the weekend before an exam sitting down and memorizing every question on the practice exams, practice questions and the end of slides, and handouts. He doesn't even ask us to apply that information. The exams will be word-for-word from those resources. While this sounds easy and for many it was, this really isn't how I learn and I found myself struggling a lot more then I should've in this course. I ended up doing worse than intermediate Micro simply because I could not get myself to memorize all that content in time. If you have the time, motivation, and tenacity to do that kind of brunt memorization, then McGee might be best for you. However, I personally wish I opted for Westerfield.

#tCFF23