Course Evaluations – Seminars in Applied Economics: Happiness and Discrimination

I took the course to take advantage of the opportunity to learn the structure of an academic paper as well as to learn R. I had limited previous R knowledge, however the use of Datacamp in the course was brilliant. All in all because of the course I was able to complete my thesis as it provided me with the structure of how to write a thesis as well as how to carry out data analysis in R. I encourage anyone with interest in data analysis to take advantage of this course.Ridaa (2019)

Imagine a friend of yours is taking this seminar. What would you recommend him/her?

I would recommend doing the seminar to prepare for their thesis. Besides the academic writing practice and feedback, completing all the R courses on Datacamp really gives you solid R skills which can then be used for data analysis in your thesis or as an extra skill

I highly recommend the course to anyone since it will improve writing skills as well as coding.

This seminar requires a lot of patience and feels pretty long, but it's all worth it in the end. Prepare to dedicate a lot of time, especially at the beginning. The R-script assignments might seem hard and demand for great efforts, but it feels really good when you finally solve them. Following all the guidelines and announcements is crucial.

The language of numbers

Course statistics

Semester	# Participants	% Female	Ø Grade
2019/2020	9 (BA)	66 %	2,0
2020	11 (BA) / 4 (MA)	73 %	2,1
2020/2021

Check out the average grade for the seminar. Are good grades easy to get? We may need more information about candidates interested in the course, those starting the course but dropping out early. There could be self selection of highly motivated students who make it until the end. Thus grades might not be a good indicator for difficulty. Perhaps high difficulty and workload works as a filter and only high performer remain in class.

Background Knowledge of Class 2019

Most students rated their background knowledge in Economics and Statistics as “okay” (mode). Academic writing experience was mixed. R Experience was limited. Still, considering the overall good final grades we may conclude that sound statistics background is more important than prior programming. In other words, students can learn R programming within the scope of a semester.