Professor
Patrick Convery
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2016 - If I had the chance to go back and re-plan my schedule, I would not have taken Econ with Patrick Convery. I think that the material that was taught was interesting but his lectures are extremely boring (and pointless because he puts the lectures up online) and he just reads off the slides. There is no homework in his class but there are suggested reading assignments that no one really does (but I found them helpful because Convery was not helpful at all). There are 2 midterms each worth 25% of your grade and the final that's worth 50% of your grade. I didn't do that well on the fist midterm and when I went to go see him to talk about what I did wrong and to go over the concepts, he didn't really answer my questions and I found the other meetings I had with him were unhelpful. The TA's for this quarter were all very unhelpful and the only recommendations that Convery gave to me was to get a tutor (who cost $70/hour). He also purposefully said that he would make the second midterm and final harder so that there was a larger distribution in terms of grades amongst the class. I would suggest not to take Econ 1 with Convery and spare yourself the tears and stress.
Spring 2016 - If I had the chance to go back and re-plan my schedule, I would not have taken Econ with Patrick Convery. I think that the material that was taught was interesting but his lectures are extremely boring (and pointless because he puts the lectures up online) and he just reads off the slides. There is no homework in his class but there are suggested reading assignments that no one really does (but I found them helpful because Convery was not helpful at all). There are 2 midterms each worth 25% of your grade and the final that's worth 50% of your grade. I didn't do that well on the fist midterm and when I went to go see him to talk about what I did wrong and to go over the concepts, he didn't really answer my questions and I found the other meetings I had with him were unhelpful. The TA's for this quarter were all very unhelpful and the only recommendations that Convery gave to me was to get a tutor (who cost $70/hour). He also purposefully said that he would make the second midterm and final harder so that there was a larger distribution in terms of grades amongst the class. I would suggest not to take Econ 1 with Convery and spare yourself the tears and stress.
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2021 - This class was a pleasant surprise, and I found it to be much better than Econ 1 last quarter. Convery is very straightforward, and goes over real world examples to make the content more applicable. While his lecture delivery is fairly dry, the workload in his class is light with the only weekly deliverables being the homeworks, which are a guaranteed 100%. The midterm and final were identical in difficulty to the homework, and he also offered multiple timeslots to accommodate people in different time zones. Would definitely recommend this professor for anyone taking Econ 2.
Spring 2021 - This class was a pleasant surprise, and I found it to be much better than Econ 1 last quarter. Convery is very straightforward, and goes over real world examples to make the content more applicable. While his lecture delivery is fairly dry, the workload in his class is light with the only weekly deliverables being the homeworks, which are a guaranteed 100%. The midterm and final were identical in difficulty to the homework, and he also offered multiple timeslots to accommodate people in different time zones. Would definitely recommend this professor for anyone taking Econ 2.
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2021 - I wouldn't recommend this class. The midterm (30% of the grade) was reasonable and the final was unreasonably difficult. Given that the latter constitutes half of the grade for this course, I can't recommend taking it. The problem sets (20% of the grade) were also difficult as they were mostly content that the professor hadn't covered in lecture. The difficulty of the testing aside, Dr. Convery doesn't know how to lecture. He goes over a scanned pdf notes and talks over them every single lecture and then expects us to understand. Once in a while he might look over an example problem from the textbook and just talk over it and very briefly explain the steps. He doesn't do a good job of explaining any lecture content and you have to teach yourself through the problem sets and materials given for the practice midterms and finals. There were a plethora of equations required to solve problems that he never gave us that I was only able to find in the practice materials. Overall, his lack of teaching ability doesn't allow him to test us as rigorously as he does (many test questions required knowledge of minutia that he mentioned one time and never brought up again), which is why I would not take this class with Dr. Convery again.
Fall 2021 - I wouldn't recommend this class. The midterm (30% of the grade) was reasonable and the final was unreasonably difficult. Given that the latter constitutes half of the grade for this course, I can't recommend taking it. The problem sets (20% of the grade) were also difficult as they were mostly content that the professor hadn't covered in lecture. The difficulty of the testing aside, Dr. Convery doesn't know how to lecture. He goes over a scanned pdf notes and talks over them every single lecture and then expects us to understand. Once in a while he might look over an example problem from the textbook and just talk over it and very briefly explain the steps. He doesn't do a good job of explaining any lecture content and you have to teach yourself through the problem sets and materials given for the practice midterms and finals. There were a plethora of equations required to solve problems that he never gave us that I was only able to find in the practice materials. Overall, his lack of teaching ability doesn't allow him to test us as rigorously as he does (many test questions required knowledge of minutia that he mentioned one time and never brought up again), which is why I would not take this class with Dr. Convery again.
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2022 - This was a pretty useful and easy class, definitely recommend it as a 106 elective. There were 4 lab projects to be done with a group. They could be confusing at times, but were relatively straightforward as long as you reviewed the prompt thoroughly and pay attention to what he says. They were mostly graded on a completion/try your best basis - my group made reasonable estimates/assumptions when we got confused and scored full credit on all the labs, despite our accuracy being off at times. Just be sure to clearly list out the assumptions you made. Class is pretty boring and I only went to one session, since they were recorded on zoom for us (due to Covid). He doesn't really add much content besides what's on the slides themselves, although he usually clarifies/elaborates on topics a bit so I would recommend watching every lecture at least once at 2x speed or something. Exams were based almost exclusively on the practice problems and practice exams he gave us, as well as the example problems in the slides. Review the problems, exams, and slides well and you should be good to go for the exams. Some reviews recommend doing all of the problems rather than just the highlighted ones, but this would take forever since there are so many practice problems. I just did the highlighted ones (in addition to exams + slides) and scored a comfortable A in the class. Exams were a mix of multiple choice and short response, and timing was definitely an issue for me on the midterm, so be prepared to work as fast as possible. For our in-person final (midterm was online), he allowed us to bring one cheat sheet (front and back), which was more than enough space for the necessary formulas and examples. All in all, pretty straightforward class. He can be unresponsive to emails at times, but he usually responds within a week or so unless the email gets lost in his inbox. TA's were helpful my quarter. You definitely don't need to read through the textbook. A lot of the topics were certainly interesting...for a lot of us it was our first time learning about investing, bonds, loans, valuation, and forecasting. More practical than probably all the other econ courses I have taken here.
Winter 2022 - This was a pretty useful and easy class, definitely recommend it as a 106 elective. There were 4 lab projects to be done with a group. They could be confusing at times, but were relatively straightforward as long as you reviewed the prompt thoroughly and pay attention to what he says. They were mostly graded on a completion/try your best basis - my group made reasonable estimates/assumptions when we got confused and scored full credit on all the labs, despite our accuracy being off at times. Just be sure to clearly list out the assumptions you made. Class is pretty boring and I only went to one session, since they were recorded on zoom for us (due to Covid). He doesn't really add much content besides what's on the slides themselves, although he usually clarifies/elaborates on topics a bit so I would recommend watching every lecture at least once at 2x speed or something. Exams were based almost exclusively on the practice problems and practice exams he gave us, as well as the example problems in the slides. Review the problems, exams, and slides well and you should be good to go for the exams. Some reviews recommend doing all of the problems rather than just the highlighted ones, but this would take forever since there are so many practice problems. I just did the highlighted ones (in addition to exams + slides) and scored a comfortable A in the class. Exams were a mix of multiple choice and short response, and timing was definitely an issue for me on the midterm, so be prepared to work as fast as possible. For our in-person final (midterm was online), he allowed us to bring one cheat sheet (front and back), which was more than enough space for the necessary formulas and examples. All in all, pretty straightforward class. He can be unresponsive to emails at times, but he usually responds within a week or so unless the email gets lost in his inbox. TA's were helpful my quarter. You definitely don't need to read through the textbook. A lot of the topics were certainly interesting...for a lot of us it was our first time learning about investing, bonds, loans, valuation, and forecasting. More practical than probably all the other econ courses I have taken here.
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