ECON 4350

I like Mcgee as a person - he's kind, understanding, and wants his students to succeed. One of the good aspects of this class is that exams make up almost all of your grade and are incredibly easy because they test content similar to the old practice exams that Mcgee provides. The remainder of the grade is participation (attending 7 discussions - easy) and a presentation (5-6 minutes per person on a wide variety of topics - easy and little more than a completion grade). In addition, the content itself is extraordinarily interesting, and it's cool to learn how to value stocks and other things.

That said, Mcgee is not a highly effective lecturer. It's hard to follow what's going on in class, and lectures often felt like a waste of time. That's a shame, because whenever I went to his office hours, he explained things in a much more engaging and digestible way. Overall, I felt like the structure of lectures and the course as a whole made it difficult to retain any information, and I think there are probably better 4000-level Econ electives to take.

Look, Mcgees a nice guy but the dude really does not know how to teach a class. It's impossible to follow this guy. His lectures are boring and the slides are usually ripped from the textbook. The only issue is he LOVES putting his own spin on things. It's the most annoying thing ever, on a test bro will ask you to explain "Mcgees [insert the most random corny name] theory" on a test. You'll be cruising along calculating NPV until he hits you with that "What was Mcgees wacky tacky itsy bitsy hypothesis on interest rates we covered in class?" Like CMON bro...

You'll get by fine, ie A minus - B territory, if you don't go to lectures. You'll just miss the random tangents he goes on in class that show up on the test. I swear I STILL be missing his tangents even when I show up to lecture though, which is crazy. It's literally impossible to pay attention in his lectures, you'll understand after the first week.

The second issue I have is the way he writes tests and handouts. Man I wish I can put a photo of an example here cause it's actually heinous. He'll give you handouts and the questions are straight up just PARAGRAPHS. Like he just lists every single assumption in a 1.15 spaced chunk of text that takes up 25% of the page and basically says go figure it out. On some where's waldo shit I spend most of my time searching through this block of text for the numbers I need than actually solving the problem itself. Someone please put this dude on the equation editor in Word for the love of god

But yeah, his questions are on some stream of consciousness type beat. Bro just brain dumps and maybe he knows whats going on but I sure as hell don't. His tests don't really get any better either, which brings me to my third issue

His grading on his tests is kinda weird and just because of the sheer amount of random shit he expects you to know. For his short answer questions as an example he looks for keywords, so you can understand a concept and explain it clearly but still lose points because you didn't mention a term he covered in class.

So yeah in conclusion probably don't take this class. The content is easy (tbh you can probably just self study it) but Mcgee makes things more difficult than they have to be.

I really enjoyed the material in this class- more like a Comm school class than an Econ class. However, McGee's teaching was not effective at time as he goes through material like everyone already knows what he is teaching. He will start doing an example and the majority of the class will have no idea what is going on. I found it very helpful to read the textbook chapter he is teaching before coming to lecture. This made things in lecture make much more sense. You definitely need to read the textbook chapters thoroughly before quizzes and exams if you want to do well. There is a lot of stuff on the quizzes especially that is not covered in lecture and is straight from the textbook. The quizzes were not hard granted you study the chapter well and know how to do all the examples he goes over in class. The exams were harder than the quizzes and I scored worse on them as well. Overall, i really liked this course but its not easy and you need to put in the time. My TA Joe Anderson was one of the best TA's I've ever had- he taught us more in discussion section that we learned in lecture.

Really strange class. I took it during the COVID semester so there was just nothing synchronous. Professor McGee seems nice and the content itself is really straightforward. Sometimes the lectures are a bit confusing but the problem sets and tests (which comprise your whole grade) are fair