Student fury over 'impossible' economics exam

Final-year students at a university in England are lipid after they took an

economics exam. Students from the University of Sheffield Got together
to sign a petition stating the exam questions were 'impossible' to answer.
Nearly all of the 100 students who took the exam complained and signed
the online petition wanting that the university to look into this. The
students who wrote the petition argued that the paper was highly unfair
and in some parts, unreasonable, as it required maths skills which were
not taught on the module.
They went on to claim that the modules lecturer made it clear that the
test would only involve simple maths. They are now worried that they
will get low test scores, and that this will affect what kind of degree they
get.
Prof Andy Dickerson, the head of the economics department, told BBC
News not all the questions were mathematically based.
Those that had mathematical content were set at a level consistent with
the maths taught to all economics students, including those on dual
degrees. Professor Dickerson also said all the exam questions were on
topics the students had studied.
He said: "All questions were based on topics taught in the course and for
which further reading was provided." He added that one question in the
exam used a term that students may not have seen before. He said this
was no problem because the question explained the meaning of the term.
The department added the exam would be second-marked internally and
moderated by external examiners.
"All module marks are compared across modules at each level to ensure
comparability.
If there are large discrepancies, adjustments are considered by the
examination board.

TAKING EXAMS: Rank these with your partner. Put the best advice for taking exams at the top. Change
partners often and share your rankings.
sleep

get up very early

make notes

take a lucky mascot

 drink coffee

sit next to the top student

study with a friend

relax

The impossible question: Can you answer it?

3. Consider a country with many cities and assume there are N>0 people in each city. Output per person is
N0.5 and there is a coordination cost per person of yN2. Assume that > 0 and y > 0.
a) What sort of things does the coordination cost term yN2 represent? Why does it make sense that the
exponent on N is greater than 1? [10 marks]
b) Draw a graph of per-capita consumption as a function of N and derive the optimal city size N. How does
it depend on the parameters of and y? Provide intuition for your answers. [10 marks]
c) Describe which combinations of and y generate a peasant economy, meaning an economy with no citiies
(or 1-person cities). Why might the values of the parameters and y have changed over time? What do these
changes imply in terms of the optimal city size? [10 marks]
UNIVERSITY: How useful are these university courses? Complete this table with your partner(s). Change
partners often and share what you wrote.
How useful?

Why?

History of Art
Music
Engineering
English literature
Computer science
Geography

Write five GOOD questions about exams / learning / university in the table. Do this in pairs. Each student
must write the questions on his / her own paper.
When you have finished, interview other students. Write down their answers.

Q.1.
Q.2.
Q.3.

STUDENT 1

STUDENT 2

STUDENT 3

_____________

_____________

_____________

Q.4.
Q.5.