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bheld

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  1. yeah, actex are actually the ones I'm familiar with. If you can get it cheap it's worth it.
  2. Casella and Berger is impossible in two weeks. This sounds a bit crazy but if you can get your hands on study materials for the actuary P exam and run through it before math camp starts it will give you a great foundation for first year. A good exam prep booklet will cover the basics of probability and give you plenty of problems to solve.
  3. The best way to show the nonexistence of nash equilibria is to assume they exist and then show some sort of contradiction, usually that the strategies are not actually best responses. In this case you want to look at the seller's decision to set a price after the buyer has made his investment. Given each of the buyer's strategies what is the seller's best response (selling price)? Now look at these pairs and check to make sure that they are best responses for the buyer given the seller's price. Usually it helps to break these into intervals and go case by case. Remember that the pure strategies consist of all the positive reals, not just the two that will be randomized over.
  4. One more piece of advice would be to engage students as much as possible as the sessions led by TAs are probably the only opportunity for them to interact in a class setting. You're not there to impress them with your econ skills so back off a bit and let them do more on their own. Anybody involved in education for even a short amount of time will end up hearing the axiom that the best way to learn something is to teach it to somebody else, so don't hog the learning. It's perfectly acceptable for them to learn/discuss/explain things together with you sitting in the corner twiddling your thumbs. Just make sure things are heading in the right direction.
  5. I think the worst experiences are due to either a lack of communication skills or a lack of caring on the part of the TA. The latter is obviously easier to rectify than the former. Anyway, TAs are mostly responsible for presenting examples and answering questions. You don't really need extraordinary expository skills. Undergrads are smart enough to understand the difference between a full professor making six figures and a grad student TA and adjust expectations accordingly. Leave the fancy presentations and activities to the professors and just take a positive attitude into the sessions and things should work out fine.
  6. You can't really knock the University of Tokyo either.
  7. get the gov loan, they are infinitely more flexible and easier to deal with than private firms. The variable rate will be higher by the time you start paying on it anyway.
  8. Are the french schools affected by the strikes/protests/whatever? I might go to Barcelona just to avoid that stuff.
  9. It would help if there were some agreement about the actual purpose of grades. Both arguments in this thread are valid depending on whether the goal is to sort or rank students or if the goal is to communicate mastery of a certain subject. I'm partial to the latter and therefore criterion-based assessment. I don't really get the point of grade quotas.
  10. I believe Heilbroner more than this guy. Worldly Philosophers > some online article
  11. Seems to be more of an argument in favor of a particular approach to economic thought than a true historical account.
  12. Well parental involvement is a key indicator of school success. The problem is that there are too many parents that are not involved in some districts. Privatization is not going to fix this. Um yeah, that's like the first thing anybody considers. It's driven school reform for the past fifty years. If that were the root cause we wouldn't be having this discussion now. Counteracting this income disparity within the education system is where "throwing money at the problem" came from.
  13. Public schools are operated and overseen at the local level. If parents and other people living in a low-performing district gave a damn they would have better schools. If they don't care enough already to ensure a quality education, moving to a market-based system would only serve to exacerbate the problem. Now, using taxpayer money, bad parents are able to pick a school based on their own priorities instead of society's. School quality won't matter for most of them, because it doesn't matter for most of them now. What you're going to have are glorified day care centers where kids with bad parents are basically in holding tanks all day long. You're also losing sight of the motivation for public schools to begin with. It's a public service just like roads, defense, whatever. Society as a whole foots the bill because of the positive externalities created from education. It's not just parents that pay, therefore whether they like it or not they are not the only people that have a say in how schools are run. Unfortunately there are larger societal problems at the root of the problem and as much as people removed from the issue love to prescribe their own solutions (Gates Foundation, Cato, NEA, whoever) until the greater issue of inequality is solved even the most well-intentioned plans are doomed.
  14. You're running into the common problem of how to define "good" and "bad" and alluding to opinions that have more to do with demographics than school quality. Also, research on school choice is notoriously bad. Even if you can get over the selection bias hurdle it takes a lot to make a convincing argument. I'm not really following your argument here.
  15. If you know of a way to accurately and reliably determine the quality of a school you need to forget about a PhD and get rich consulting for the federal government and state departments of education. Even if this were possible you would still have to deal with a significant lag to allow for data collection. Ergo, information asymmetry.
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