This unit was really weirdly run. Lectures were extremely inefficient and Tushar often went on bizarre rants about everything ranging from GMOs to immigration and traditional gender roles. The weekly assignments are easy if you can do basic calculus and the reading assignment is fine, so you can get close to 45% of your grade really easily. However, the exam had no connection to the practice material and as far as I can tell most people think it was a pretty brutal end to the unit. Tutorials were helpful for the weekly assignments, but again were not helpful for the exam. I don't think it's necessarily a good or bad unit, but I think if you want to succeed you either have to (a) be pretty familiar with this content already or (b) an extremely diligent and motivated student. I don't know my exam grade yet, but I got 43.8/45 possible marks for the rest of the unit without too much effort (1-2 hours for the weekly assignment, 4 hours for the reading assignment). Anybody with a beginner's understanding of calculus could get that with a similar level of effort. It's definitely a unit where you can achieve a high grade, but it's just an excruciating experience to get there.

A very interesting unit that will definitely broaden your thinking in microecons. Tushar is an excellent lecturer, never found any of his lectures boring and he covered the materials thoroughly each week, step by step. Do take this unit if you're strong in calculus, otherwise it would be really tedious for you to catch up.

This unit was overall good and an easy HD for me. It was very maths focussed and you need a good grip on calculus, in particular polynomial differentiation. There were no in-semester tests, which was a bonus. Each week we had to answer and submit assigned questions which were mostly maths-based problems and generally not difficult to solve. Also, there was a reading assignment where you had to write a review on one of the selected journal articles. I didn’t do well on this task and what was disappointing was that no feedback was given to us. The assignment also felt disconnected from the rest of the unit, as it was very subjective. The unit coordinator discouraged us from appealing to our tutor who marked this assignment since the average was supposedly too high and they were already lenient, and we could cause annoyance to our tutor. If this assignment didn’t existed then I would’ve given this unit a five star review. The lectures each week were presented by the lecturer Tushar at a very slow pace, which didn’t really appeal to me as I’m a fast learner. I felt that I was more efficiently learning the content by reading off the slides rather than attending the lectures. The tutorials were good as the tutors show you how to solve a variety of questions, which were sometimes of a higher difficulty than assessed in the assignments and exam. The exam was a breeze and mostly maths-based, except for one random multiple choice question where they asked you “Which of the following is the father of the green revolution”, which was literally mentioned once throughout the entire unit by the lecturer. If you enjoy microeconomics and maths then I would recommend this unit as a follow up to ECON1101.

This unit was pretty intensive because I did it over the summer semester. If you stay on top of it, you can do really well. If you know calculus it will definitely help.

Absolutely great in deeper my understanding in microeconomics. Many concepts and calculations not require calculus, but using calculus is definitely better in understanding of this unit. I do prefer to use calculus rather than the slope the understand MR, MC etc. I do recommend have a bit understanding of calculus to study this unit.

I took the unit over summer 2018/9 with Ishita. A lot of time is spent going over first year concepts again in the ~20 hours of YouTube lectures, but the new content was quite tricky. Ishita is generally OK at explaining the concepts, but reading the Perloff text (available for free through OneSearch) really helped clear up any misunderstandings. The tutes were two hours twice a week for four weeks in January. One tute was presenting answers in groups to randomly assigned tute questions and getting graded. There is a 20% weighting for this over the 4 weeks so my advice is to meet with your group and discuss the answers before each tute as really high marks are possible if you come prepared. The whole exercise was demanding but helped me massively in wrapping my head around the content. The other tute would start with a 12 straightforward open-book MCQs (10% weighting), and then there would be a "simulation" activity which was a bit of a waste of time. The 2000-word assignment (20%), asking you to apply the unit content to a real-world market was challenging but beneficial in helping you recap what you learnt and showing you how it (somewhat) links to real-life. The exam (50%) was doable but very calc-heavy (rather than requiring a lot of wordy explanations) - plenty of demand and cost equations that needed to be solved for profit etc. This does reflect the very mathematical flavour of the unit. Make sure you understand all the "Something to work on:" bits in the videos. For a "policy and applications" unit it was very technical - all essential knowledge if you want to work in economic research, but unlike ECON1101 the new concepts didn't have much use outside this arena. What real-world aspects covered were mainly the bits recycled from first year. However the unit was definitely well-run by Ishita, and the problem-solving tutes were a particular highlight.

Great Unit. The content is easy to understand