Exams, Exams and Results, Oh My!

End Game for Term 2
It's crunch time! We're heading into the home stretch of Term 2. I can't believe we are almost 1/3 done with the program already! It's flying by. Here's some thoughts from last weekend, which was an extra long three day session from Thursday through Saturday. These three day sessions are real killers to get through. By the third day, everyone is pretty much brain dead. And the rain started in SF, making the trek back and forth from the hotel far less pleasant than we have enjoyed so far. I saw a lot more cab receipts this time around. I decided to walk because the fresh air and exercise really is nice after sitting through all the hours of lecture.
Exams, Exams, and Results, Oh My!
Well, we got back the results from our Macroeconomics mid-term, Statistics mid-term, and OPIM final this session, and we took our Leadership final on Thursday afternoon. I breathed a sigh of relief as I managed to do just fine pretty much across the board, with some variation. I was pretty worried about Macro, but Abel seemed like he was pretty generous on the grading, that's all I have to say! Otherwise the mean would have been much lower than 121 out of 164 (sd of 21. The amazing thing was that the average for the 7 bonus points was 6.58 with a standard deviation of 1.51. What did you have to do to get the bonus? Put your name on the line on the top of the pages in all caps. I was pretty sure the mean would be 7 with a sd of 0, but I guess someone missed that. Looks like the final exams also give bonus points for your name on the top of each page, so there's no way anyone should miss it if they read this?
MacroSim and Abel Quips
Well, we started off the weekend with a computer simulation of a closed economy in groups of two or three. My team got DQed when I failed to hit OK on the dialog in round 4. That's ok, we were outta control anyway at 78% inflation by that point anyway. And then we got out of control again when we kept playing the game. My take after playing: if these equations represent anything close to a real economy, the variables are so sensitive and complex that I now have a vastly increased respect for economists. It's anything but straightforward.

The team that won in BOTH sections won by cooperating between the fiscal and monetary teams, and they are rewarded with 12 bonus points on the final. Unfortunately, Abel said this afterward:

"The good news is that you got 12 points extra on the final. The bad news is that the final is worth 1 million points."

I'm pretty sure he was kidding, so those dudes don't have to worry about the final as much as the rest of us. Abel spent the other lectures on asset markets, money, and prices, a current policy topic on indexed bonds, exchange rates and open-economy macro policy, macro policy in Argentina, monetary non-neutrality and the Phillips curve, and political business cycles.

By popular demand, here's the top quips and quotes:
Abel: "What's the value of e?" Eve: "2.7182818284680298432". Abel: "We could get you help."
(About the J Curve): "If they came up with the idea 40 years ago, they might have called it the Nike Swoosh."
(Looking at Murat's empty seat next to Sean): "I think he thinks it's like a wedding, where you can RSVP or not. Wait til he sees the thank you note."
"This is really a rectangular hyperbola. But if you want to call it a downward sloping curve that's fine."
"'Beggar Thy Neighbor' is British speak for screw your neighbor."
"I don't mean Monopoly money, I mean the money that the monopoly issues."
"Restructuring is such a cool word. It means I owe you a ton of money and there's no way in hell I'll repay it."
"Who was Phillips?" A: "The screwdriver?"
"What's the misery index? It's not Kathleen Bates."
"Al Gore had to work really really hard to lose that election."

I got an IM message towards the end of the last session (when we were covering the plot of the Phillips Curve) that read: "This stuff is like astrology. I think I can see the Big Dipper."

Hand Cramps?
Oh yeah, and does anyone else still have hand cramps after the Leadership final? You'd think that if they could figure out how to convert the essay section of the GMAT to computer based, that Wharton could figure out how to let us use a keyboard too. One of our classmates said: "I was going to give Useem a hand signal after the final exam but my hand was too cramped."