ECON 3030

I enjoyed this class overall but it was challenging at times. I enjoyed the professor and thought he was engaging during lectures and approachable during office hours. He definitely wanted his students to succeed. The main challenging parts were the models that could get complex. The tests were also weighted heavily and covered some of the more challenging material. But if you're willing to put in the time and effort it's not too bad. #tCFF23

Prof. Bethune is a great lecturer. He makes everything super clear and organized. Assignments help a lot in exams. If you pay enough attention to assignments and listen to him in class, you will get a fair grade. No readings, no group work, fair workload, easy course.

Professor Bethune is a great lecturer. He is extremely passionate about the banking system. This class is a great elective to fulfill the economics major. The grading system is three midterms each worth 25% (non-cumulative), MyEconLab homeworks worth 24%, and the final course evaluation worth 1%. The first midterm catches a few people by surprise because you need to memorize the OLG Model. The material in his powerpoints is much more important than the book chapters but they were also good supplements. Averages on the midterms were usually high 70's. TL;DR Great professor, average difficulty, Memorize OLG model and powerpoint slides

I have an interesting opinion of Professor Bethune. He's a young guy, fresh out of the econ Ph.D. program at UC-Santa Barbara. Very intelligent guy, but I really disliked his course. I did not dislike Professor Bethune. In fact, he was one of the more cheery professors I've had. However, as the semester went on I felt more and more like his class was getting in the way of my other classes and commitments because I didn't learn anything valuable. I honestly didn't take much away from any of his lectures. The only lectures that you MUST go to are the ones where he goes over the banking model and overlapping generations model. Regarding those models, Godspeed. Maybe if you're a heavy finance person in the Comm School (hence the course, "Money & Banking"), you'd get these models very quickly, but I'm a non-finance econ major that hopes to go into consulting or management and, honestly, the models confused the hell out of me. Everything from the textbook and lecture notes is straightforward in the class, but the technical aspects of the models are ridiculously difficult to wrap your head around if you're not a math theory or finance person. These will be your downfall on the exams. Study the textbook fiercely and do your best on understanding the models and that's all anyone can ask of you. Should end up with a B even if the models make sh** for sense to you. TAs for Spring 2017 were unhelpful. Hopefully they have better ones now.

Bethune's lectures are all over the place. He uses slides, but they aren't very good. He releases them though, so at least you have his notes. That really is helpful because his exams essentially only cover the things he emphasizes in lecture, which he usually notes in the lecture slides. But still, I found his lecturing style not too conducive for learning the material. The content itself is relatively interesting. if you want to learn about why banks are important to society. Overall, he's a nice guy, but I wouldn't suggest the class for non-Econ majors because there are better classes out there.

Extremely interesting class, you will learn a lot of very practical information in this class regarding how the financial industry is structured, lessons from the recent crisis, and how the federal reserve operates. Especially if you're if you're trying to go into finance this is a great class to get a background into the industry. Professor Bethune is pretty nice and laid back, seems like his grading curve was easier than Doyle's as well. Fair grader.