ECON 101 and PHIL 120

ECON 101 (with Dr. Ratna Shrestha)

• Course Taken: MWF 9am (September, 2012 - December, 2012) 
• Format: The format of this course includes weekly Aplia quizzes (online), midterm, and a final. Aplia quizzes gave you 3 tries, and then it averaged all your attempts. I found his notes quite good and his exams fair. If you do his practice questions, you should be fine. His exam style consists of MC, fill in the blanks (similar to Aplia), and a couple short open ended questions. 
• Textbook: Principles of Microeconomics, Canadian Edition 5E by Mankiw; if you buy your book used, make sure you take into account for the fact you need to buy an online Aplia access code. 
• Tutorial: Our tutorial was optional, and I only went to the first one. ECON 310 is the upper-year equivalent as ECON 101 except it does not have the tutorial. 
• Class average: 71% (highest grade, 94%)
• Personal Experience: I found this class decently easy because I was comfortable with reading graphs. While I always went to lecture, I spent most of the time finishing my Aplia quizzes in-class. Dr. Shrestha speaks clearly and is easy to understand. For the midterm, make sure you are not late because our section didn't have enough seats and some people had to write their midterm standing up (we were in Chem D200 lecture hall that seats around 80ish people). 

PHIL 120 (with Dr. Leslie Burkholder)

• Course Taken: Tu/Th 5:30pm (January, 2013 - April, 2013) 
• Format: This course is practically an “online” course with 12 supervised, closed book quizzes, you are expected to do these outside lecture time at designated time/locations. No final or midterm. These online quizzes are EXTREMELY similar to the practice questions. Dr. Burkholder’s lectures were quite repetitive. He is interesting to talk to if you go to his office hours. Very knowledgable in game theory. 
• TAs: The TA's are very friendly. Some of them are unfamiliar with the course and what Dr. Burkholder is asking. However, Dr. Burkholder is always quick with answer emails.
• Textbook: I did not bother to get the textbook. 
• Class average: 67% (I suspect the average is lower due to people forgetting to do their quizzes, which close after 2-3 weeks)
• Personal Experience: I found a lot of the logic questions and examples very strange since they were given out of context. However, after taking more PHIL courses, I now understand where he got the examples. If you are not comfortable with logic, you can probably still memorize your way through this course by remembering which cases of "if", "xor", "or", "then", "but" statements make the entire sentence true or false. Dr. Burkholder also lectures back-to-back and he allows you to go to either lecture section, so if you got into the later section you can still go to the earlier lecture. 

• Advice: If you are interested in logic, I would just do PHIL 220 since PHIL 120 was extremely basic. However, if you want to take this course, you can only do so before you reach 90 credits (~before the end of "third year").