Jonathan Vogel

Jonathan Vogel has definitely improved over the years, considering his previous bad reviews below. I guess he reads the reviews and really want to be a better teacher. He is a nice guy who wants to sound sound fun, and sometimes does the job well. He talks a lot about econ majors either become professor and poor or go to IB and earn a lot, and he grudges that students today can report him for using "sexist" examples in class. I guess he might have had some unpleasant experience with the Gender-Based Misconduct office. I don't see anything inappropriate in his class though. Liberal snowflakes who's gonna be triggered by "battle of the sexes", a game theory example, please avoid. He really likes game theory and will mention it the whole latter part of the class. Like other reviews say, if you only get one thing out of the class, that'd be in a Nash Equilibrium, both players have "no unilateral incentive to deviate". This will be repeated infinite times in his lectures. He does a good job at feeding the material to you, but not as inspiring - making you think of bigger issues like human nature - as Xavier Sala-i-Martin does. Preview reviews say that his homeworks are easy and exams hard, but in Spring 2017 IMO the difference in difficulty was not obvious between HWs and exams. In fact, many people left Midterm 2 and Final at least half an hour before time up. Exams have mean abou…

Vogel is a very smart man. His teaching style is very systemized in that he has a clear outline of what he wants to cover during any given lecture and he rarely gets sidetracked. Sometimes he speeds through certain concepts in lecture that you have to go over later on your own to understand fully. His Econ class was very very very math-heavy. Never on any midterm or final did we get a question about a purely economic question. The closest questions we would have that could be explained using words were those with SPNEs and whether or not a strategy was feasible. I would recommend this class to anyone who likes math. I was caught off guard and didn't do too well on the first midterm, but I did really well on the 2nd midterm and final once I realized you only needed to understand the math. I think you should go to lectures because he doesn't post the answers to examples he does in class on the online lecture notes. I never went to recitation though and I got an A in this class. I think he curved to a B+

It was hard to follow along with Professor Vogel. He went way too fast for people who were not familiar with the concepts. He seemed to assume that everyone was naturally going to understand the concepts. Yes we all go to a prestigious school where there is the expectation that most students are fast learners but it was hard to follow and even harder to catch up. Professor Vogel was also intimidating. I was afraid to ever ask him questions or go to his office hours. I went once and when I asked him something he told me I was suppose to know it. Though he did explain it to me, that comment really made me feel bad. I went to two separate TA's. Asher was much more helpful than Sam who made it apparent that he did not care about the students and the class. Everytime it turned 9, he would rush out and said he wasn't going to take any more questions. In addition, Sam was never sure about the problems. A general problem about the two TA's are that they never looked at the material before recitation so they were never familiar with the questions we asked them. They worked on the problems on the spot which took more time. I have never felt so helpless in any other class. The homework assignments were fair. But the exams were incredibly ridiculous and did not reflect what we learned in class. I understand Vogel wanted to challenge us with the concepts we learned in class but it is unbel…

DO NOT TAKE VOGEL. DO NOT TAKE VOGEL. DO NOT TAKE VOGEL. DO NOT TAKE VOGEL. DO NOT TAKE VOGEL. DO NOT TAKE VOGEL. DO NOT TAKE VOGEL. DO NOT TAKE VOGEL. DO NOT TAKE VOGEL. DO NOT TAKE VOGEL. DO NOT TAKE VOGEL. DO NOT TAKE VOGEL. Unless you are a math genius (scored nationally in the AMC or something along those lines), you will have an incredibly tough time getting a B+ or above in this class. This class is packed with math geniuses who ruin the median, bringing it up to 80-ish levels. Basically how it ends up working out is you either get the math completely or you don't get what's going on, which makes the distribution super skewed and thus hard to do well in unless you're one of those who has amazing math skills. I got an A in Calc III and an A in Intermediate Macro as a freshman, and am having a tough time even getting a B in this class. Vogel in general makes you feel like shit about yourself, and I pretty much feel like crying every day about this class. Problem sets are deceptively easy, midterms and exams end up being HARDER THAN ANYTHING YOU'VE SEEN IN THE CLASS.

For starters, Professor Vogel is actually a good lecturer. He will repeat key concepts and make it so that you will know them by heart. I don't think that I will ever forget that a Nash Equilibrium is a set of strategies such that no individual player has a unilateral incentive to deviate given the strategies of all other players. With all that said, there are some drawbacks to being in his class. The two midterms and final account for 85% of your final grade, and neither the problem sets that he assigns nor the lecture slides he posts are of any help. Since Professor Vogel likes to bring up baseball from time to time, let's do that here. Taking one of his tests is like hitting a curveball. Actually, it's more like hitting a knuckleball, as in you have no idea where the test is going to go, and no amount of studying can truly prepare you for one of his tests. You just have to close your eyes, swing as hard as you can, and hope to make contact. On the plus side, almost all of your classmates are doing the same exact thing. Finally, a note on grading. Professor Vogel tries to curve the median to a B+ and the mean to somewhere between a B+ and a B. This could wreck your GPA if you're not careful.

Jonathan Vogel figuratively teaches economics with a metronome. There, you see the beauty of math and economics. He writes his exams in a way that require that same metronome and thus a real skillful set of hands during the exams (and later lectures) in order to hang.

I simply don't see how Prof. Vogel does not have a silver / gold nugget (well according to experience it seems gold ones are reserved for professors who hand out grades in the A-range for free). He is by far the most interesting professor I have ever had. The best thing about him is that he goes through everything through first principles. He makes the class look back, slow down and think, rather than immediately turning to cranking out the math. If you want to improve your attention to detail and learn to how to systematic, I recommend taking Microeconomics with Prof. Vogel if you can. The course is pretty manageable and the way he taught it, it was quite engaging (although I have to say that I did not attend every class). He teaches Microecon through game theory and the amount of game theory he covers in the second-third of the class, was pretty much exhaustive for a semester-long Introductory Game Theory class (sans the formalism). His exams were really engaging, and I loved solving them: I would not agree with any reviewer for the part of calling them "hard". They are more of the thought-provoking type. For example, he makes you think of the corner solutions in an optimization problem, and sometimes makes things a little abstract. Considering the homework and the final, I would agree that his homeworks are in comparison easier to work out, but similar in concept to the exa…

Man, this guy really loves his game theory. He posted slides, but they had blanks that you needed to go to class to fill in. His midterms don't have any numb Curve was harsh but fair. All in all, I had a lot more fun than Elmes kids that semester.

It reflects poorly on Columbia that a teacher like this is part of the economics department. Having had teachers like Gulati and Xavier I had come to have a lot of respect for my economics professors. However, Vogel's class was nothing but an excuse for him to please himself. The class was not cumulative at all, or at least not in a way that Vogel showed us. His classes were conducted by projecting the relevant functions on the board and then having us sit there solving problems in class for another 30 minutes (this mostly was comprised of people saying pass and the same 2-3 kids grudging through the problems every time). Needless to say, you don't really get the feeling that he teaches you anything. We were given 4 problem sets.The questions on these were easy and simplistic, there was absolutely nothing similar on the test except for the first gimme question. The problem with how he sets up his tests is that there is 1 very easy question worth about 40 points and then another 2 questions worth the other 60 points on average. I completely understand the motive for wanting a class average of around 50 so that there will be a nice spread around the mean and it will be easier to curve up. However, the average ends up being around 50 but without any spread and kids who end up being great at economics but not being able to answer his brain teasers on tests will end up lumped in wi…

Other reviewers maintain that Vogel is "amazing", but if you want to learn microeconomics, this couldn't be farther from the truth. If you want to take a class on mathematical brainteasers that are tangentially related to economics, then take this class. For example, production functions, cost functions, perfect competition, monopolies, etc. make up the bulk of economics; however, in Vogel, we rushed through these topics at the end of the course without any practice on problem sets. Also, the final only included one question on production optimization, while all of the others were brainteasers in game theory and utility optimization. You should be able to leave this class with a firm knowledge of Cornout, Bentrand, etc. Sadly, I'll forget all of these important topics in a week or so. In a subject where constant application is key to learning, Vogel decided to give us 4 extremely short and easy problem sets. Reptition and application are necessesary for learning micro, but you won't get this in Vogel. This class is about excessive pressure and tricks. If you want to learn in a productive environment, then don't take this class. Take Elmes. The problem sets are much longer in Elmes, but the tests will make sense, and you'll walk out with a better grade and better understanding of the material.