Hi,
I bring some news about the course Production Economics. I have already covered a lot of things in first part of this course desription, however, here comes a conclusion. Group projects are over, presentation is over and of course exam is over, too. Therefore my final thoughts about this course are inevitable 🙂
I suggest reading the first part of the course evaluation first, as you may be lost otherwise.
After plenty of theorethical formulas and derivatives, I mentioned that I can see a purpose of the content. Which I can confirm even now as we solved a lot of empirical exercises and used a lot of examples from the real world which for sure helped me to learn more and get a better overview about the knowledge gained within this course in the future.
What takes an important part in making this course easier to follow, is undoubtebly our proffesor Hans. His attitude towards students is admirable as he is patient, supportive and able to pass his vast knowledge on his students. What I found pleasant was that in the beginning of the course he learnt our names and he was able to remember all of us. Well, sometimes he messed up some names, however, at his age it is admirable. I felt comfortable in the class as he paid attention to an ability of all students to follow the content of the course.
The requirements of the course where:
- 3 group assignments – The group assignments were difficult and very complex and each of them was related to different area. For example, we had to examine the optimal distribution of resources on the farms, find out level of emmisions and how the change of environmental policy changes the farm´s profit. We also calculated an optimal value of some crop, considered risks for the farm and as I have already mentioned, we used a lot Lagrange multipliers.
- Final exam – First thing that come up to my mind about the exam is that is was super long! 😀 which means 5 and half hour of writing. Ok, for Swedes, it is not that surprising as they come to exam well-prepared with snacks and other refresment, however, for me it was really long. The process of the exam was basically the same as I described here, thus we picked up the number and signed our exam sheets with numbers instead of name to ensure anonymity, two people controlled us during the exam and professor came to the class only few times to answer possible questions. The test itself was difficult and challenging. We could use our notes from the lectures but sometimes it is better to rely on your knowledge and not to focus too much on looking up the information in your notes.
To conclude my thoughts, this course was well-structured to gain knowledge about economical aspects and I believe that I could make use of it in the future, maybe even in my Master thesis. Nevertheless, I suppose that this course is essential for students from Agronom or other economics programs. For students in business administration (me) it is perfect to deepen the knowledge and see environmental aspects even from the economical perspective, however, it may not be that neccessary.
Denisa