Economics · Columbia University
6 Problem Sets that do take a bit of effort. One midterm which is candidly not that hard. He released previous midterms for our class and it was incredibly similar, so long as you understood the concepts it was pretty much an easy A, and I think he does this intentionally. The final was definitely a lot harder. I don't think the final for Best, however, is tougher than Erden's, my friends showed me their final and theirs seemed a lot more rigorous and in depth. I will say Best is pretty generous with the partial credit as well on the midterms and finals. Historically in my other econ classes, partial credit basically didn't exist so I was really surprised by this. Maybe this is intentional as the midterm and final are only like a few questions, so probably does this to offset that. Not a terrible professor overall and would say probably one of the better Econometrics professors.
Wrote a thesis, learn how to write a thesis/research paper
Econometrics is obviously annoying and not fun, but Best is probably the lesser of all evils. Subject is not that great and only took this class as it was required for my major. Best is pretty understanding of this, however. He is pretty generous with the curve as well. I was roughly at the median and got an A-. A friend of mine was slightly below the mean and still received a B+, so it certainly seems like he is pretty nice with the final grading.
Support in writing a thesis in Economics.
If thinking of Grad School should definitely write an honors thesis
R studio, how to read data and interpret it, how to process data, linear regressions, panel data, and other forms of regressions
You don't learn much in the seminar itself. There is a review of applied econometric techniques but if you get into the seminar you probably already know them.
I learnt different techniques in handling regressions and the concepts behind them.
Of course, most of your work is on your own, but the TA taught us elementary data stuff (cleaning, organizing data, etc.) and Prof. Best taught us some basic identification strategies.
he course was purely about he applications of a statistics to economics but in a more technical manner. The ideas hat were introduced in courses such as STAT1201 were primarily built upon and studied more thoroughly.