This seemed to work well. For one thing, we can be reasonably sure that have learned these theories. Perhaps we also need to spend more time explaining how to read and understand published research, emphasizing how analysts more often adapt an existing model than create a truly original one. This course regularly generates low course evaluations, at least the first time an instructor teaches it. This result is likely due to several factors.
Students find the course extremely challenging and demanding.
Many complain that the expectations are too high. This makes them feel the course or the instructor is unfair. The most likely reason is that the final exam of a principles course does not require them to use what they have learned in the way that completing a serious economics research project does in ECON 300. The low course evaluation scores in and of themselves say little about the effectiveness of the course. As student expectations of the course load become more well known, one should expect the evaluations to improve-they did the second time Greenlaw taught the course.