63. What is in the Economics curriculum?

Students often ask if something is in the curriculum or if they should be able to do this or that calculation.

The answer is simple - the curriculum is described in the Student Guide. If it is in the Student Guide it is in the syllabus and the student should have some knowledge of the concepts. And herein lies the rub - how much should the student know? If he or she knows everything that is in the student guide he/she may just pass the examination.

If the learner can incorporate some of the general material of the prescribed handbook, they would have increased their success rate dramatically. They would comfortable earn their 60 - 70%. If however they are able to include some of the finer points and nuances they will be moving into the honours category.

Question papers Should contain 40%-50% of content that all students should be fully conversant with, 40% - 50% of content that students may have some knowledge of; and then 0 - 20% which will indicate the learners that have distiguised themselves in mastering the content fully.

The learning objectives in the Student Guide should give the learner a clear idea of what competencies he/she should be able to demonstrate. However we are in an academic environment and not in the industrial environment where performance is measured by saying that "You should be able to type 45 words per minute with and accuracy level of less than 5% error margin, under normal working conditions." It is a little more open ended since the area of knowledge that is being sampled is vast and the examination or test is really a sampling process to determine to what extent the learner has read widely and to what extent the learning and mastery has taken place rather than whether the learner is able to perform certain operations.

Some subjects like accounting resemble more of the former (operational learning) while say philosophy or literature may fall more into the latter category (conceptual understanding).

Economics falls between the two. Depending on the approach of the learning institution, it should provide guidance to learners to eliminate high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity.