ECON 3030

Doyle is a nice guy. But lectures aren't really helpful unless you read the powerpoints/textbook ahead of time. He is definitely an interesting professor, but you don't really get the material from him. TAs are borderline useless, and rarely in line with the professor. Exams are kind of random and graded very harshly. Overall, if you are extremely interested in this class and have some background knowledge or willing to read the textbook word for word, take it. Otherwise, not really worth the struggle. Dutch knockout is applied so most people ride on that. Doyle basically gives full points for all the work except exams and quizzes.

This is the review you need before deciding to take this class:
DO NOT TAKE IT. DO NOT TAKE IT.

This class is interesting, I've had friends who've really liked it and those who've wanted nothing to do with it. Lectures were pretty ineffective, and I found myself zoning out a lot. The problem sets are very similar to the tests however, and I also found reading the textbook to be extremely helpful - it covered for Doyle's mistakes/inabilities to explain concepts clearly and correctly/flat out failure to mention things. Grading is all on putting in the time - if you read and understand the material beforehand, you'll be fine. Just assuming that this course is a cakewalk though is where it gets dangerous from some kids, so make sure you put it the time that you need.

Professor Doyle is a great guy, and I am not quite sure why so many people say this class is so difficult. Full disclosure, however: I am a finance concentrator in the Comm School.

I agree the fact that ~80% of your grade comes from three exams does not leave a lot of room for error if you aren't a great test taker like myself, but I did not find much of the material itself to be difficult. If you are fairly financially inclined or are familiar with the basics of value investing (e.g. you are comfortable with the time value of money and have a basic understanding of how stocks are valued), you should find the first exam to be very easy. The second exam was a bit trickier and more abstract, but it's not terrible. The last part of the course is a lot of review from Intermediate Macro with some new topics. Some of the exam questions are poorly worded/confusing, but for the most part, I thought the exams were very straightforward. A large portion of the questions on all three exams revolve around plugging numbers into a formula. Additionally, there is very little work from week to week, with only 6 problem sets that are simply graded for completion.

I will say that I had two main complaints about the course. The first is that the lectures often felt disjointed from one another, but I found them to be sufficient as I never read a single page of the textbook. Second, I found the TA to be rather arrogant and even obnoxious at times. That said, he seems like a good guy at heart.

All in all, I highly recommend this class if you are interested in financial markets and/or investing.

This course teaches about the banking system and some investment tools. After taking it, the strongest feeling that I have is that this course should not be called "Money and Banking". Rather, it should be "Investment tools and Currency". Like ECON 2010 and ECON 2020, to be successful in this course, you have to read the textbook repeatedly. For the lecture, the only thing that you need to memorize is the formula for calculation. The course also has the Dutch Knockout which saved my GPA, but you should not expect to succeed in the final easily if you had knowledge about the course previously.

For the course structure and syllabus design, even though the structure may not be the best in best, I could definitely say that it ensures basic fairness and clearness. The content distribution may not be very suitable for me at the end of the term, but remnant parts are good.

For TA sessions, TAs will only go over the course contents and give some exercises which have a relatively great difference between the exam questions, so you cannot work like an ECON3030 student. I didn't realize this at the beginning and suffered great pressure from my grade.

For the professor, I would give a neutral opinion. I highly suspected if people got a high score on their finals since the grade instruction was hard and most of my friends did not get a high grade. The course could crash your GPA if you didn't put enough effort into it.

At the beginning and the midway of the course, I seldom went to the lecture. At that time, I always thought that I would still get a high grade even though I only watched the recordings and did not join the lecture because I have previously learned this field. However, the reality was I got an extremely low score on the two midterms. For this course, my only suggestion would be to act like a normal student. If you follow his instructions, read the book, and take notes, you can definitely get a good grade on this course.

This class is not as easy as you think it will be. The lectures Doyle provides are NOT helpful for his exams. The class average on exam 1 was lower C, upper D range. Doyle teaches the absolute basics of the class and then expects the student to read a thousand pages of a textbook then put it all together. It is only twice a week, and isn't very helpful. The class is almost never on pace to the schedule and Doyle has many anecdotes that distract the class. If you don't have to take this class, don't. Overall it was a waste of time and mostly consisted of cramming for the final which was worth around 40% of your total grade or 100% if you happen to Dutch Knockout (score higher on the exam than the whole semester combined). He essentially hands out 100 free points through 40 being participating in Kahoot! questions and 60 being homeworks that get graded on participation. These are essential or else I'd guarantee you the class average would be in the C range. Overall Doyle is not the best professor to take this with unless you really enjoy self-teaching. Not super exciting and fun especially since it is usually an early course.

The class was harder than expected, and I probably should have read much more than I did. The Problem Sets are graded on completion which is really helpful, and they aren't that frequent. Professor Doyle knows a lot about financial markets and the material, but sometimes his lectures can be really boring and feel to drag on even though they're only 50 minutes. He moves through the slides kinda fast but he posts all of them and they make more sense if you read beforehand. The Quizzes are pretty difficult, but he does post review videos which I highly recommend watching, as about 80% of the material comes directly from those. Overall not terrible but you definitely need to put in the work to get a good grade. There is basically no curve at all, and the cutoff for an A is a 95 which I would think is borderline impossible, but apparently people do it each semester.

Doyle did absolutely nothing. The material itself is very interesting and useful but Doyle is absolutely awful. His test were extremely difficult and the T.A.'s were also not helpful at all and graded super harshly

Class is straight forward, memorizing lecture notes will probably get you a B. To get an A on exams you'll need to read the assigned text book chapters thoroughly and do extra practice problems.

Doyle is a smart and great guy that was a macro decision maker at a large hedge fund. Materials not too difficult, gives you everything you need to know upfront.

Money and Banking is not the most interesting, nor the most difficult, Economics elective I have taken. The material covered – which includes bonds, stocks, derivatives, financial intermediation, bank management, and monetary policy – is not too challenging. The exam questions are also relatively straightforward and often closely reflect the questions asked on previous quizzes and homework assignments. I remain very surprised by the vast number of reviewers who suggest that this class is impossibly difficult; while a bit disorganized, it is easily possible to earn a B or above in this course.

Carter Doyle himself introduces an interesting perspective to the course, having worked in the financial markets and banking industry around the time of the 2008 recession; he provides fun anecdotes and is overall a very friendly and nice professor. However, I think that this course could have covered more content and that we could have explored some of these concepts in a more in-depth manner. Doyle's lectures would often consist of him reading the lecture slides to the class and then dismissing us early. I would, though, recommend this course to anyone interested in a not-too-stressful Economics elective that covers essential material only briefly skimmed over in the intro and intermediate macro courses.