Guy's Other Stuff

Sunday, 7 April 2013

Smokers' Corner

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

We had an email the other day from the Dean to remind those of us who smoke that they shouldn't smoke within 20 metres of the entrance to the building. Ideally they should go to the special smokers' shelter next to the bike sheds.

As I am not a smoker it doesn't affect me directly, but I do agree that it is not very pleasant entering or leaving the building when you have to pass through a haze of smoke from people smoking close to the entrance.

It is interesting to see who the smokers are. Gus reckons that there is over representation from Heads of Department and faculty managers (but not the Dean herself, of course). Gus says that he hasn't established the direction of causation - do they smoke because of the extra pressures that they are under or are people who smoke more ambitious? Anyway, he suggests, most of the key policy decisions are probably taken by the little smoking group outside the building before later getting nodded through at the Faculty Executive Committee.

It is interesting to see who smokes what too. Some seem to go for vey upmarket brands, while others prefer to smoke rather weedy roll your own ciggies. There is even a pipe smoker amongst them who likes vanilla flavoured tobacco.

The university has a heavily promoted "Smoking Cessation Programme". Whay can't they just call it a "Stop smoking" or even a "Quit smoking" programme? I sometimes wonder what it consists of. Do they provide free nicotine patches, special hypnosis sessions or is it just individual or group counselling?

I'm lucky, I suppose, that I never started smoking as we all know that nicotine is highly addictive and it must be difficult to kick the habit once you have been smoking for a while.

I do remember one of the lecturers who taught me when I was a student who managed to give up - but he then seemed to get through about four packets of mints every day.

It must cost a lot of money to smoke these days. I decided to look online to find out. I came across an interesting website for the Tobacco Manufacturers Association (TMA) at They say that popular brands now cost an average of £7.98 for a packet of 20. So if you smoke 20 cigarettes a day that would be nearly £56 a week or about £2900 a year. That is a lot of money -- more than I spend on coffee for sure!

Actually there is a lot of very interesting information on the TMA website, although of course they try to use the information there to lobby for reductions in tax and excise duty. Apparently 77% of the price of a pack of cigarettes goes in tax and duty. The total tax revenue from cigarette sales in the UK in the tax year 2011-2012 was about £12.1 billion - £9.5 billion in excise duty and £2.6 billion in VAT.

According to the TMA about 20% of the population over the age of 16 are smokers. That works out to over 10 million people. This is down from 27% in 2000. They also refer to the effect of the "duty escalator" which was introduced in 1993 which automatically put up cigarette prices by more than the rate of inflation until 2000 when it was temporarily put on hold. Because of the rapid rise in the price of cigarettes over this period the TMA argue that there was also an increase in what they call Non UK Duty Paid (NUKDP) consumption - that is cigarettes legally brought in from other EU member states where prices are lower, or smuggled in illegally. This could mean that HMRC missed out on up to £3 billion of tax revenue over that period.

I know that one of the exercises that students taking the econometrics module have to do is to model cigarette demand with a view to estimating the price elasticity of demand for cigarettes. Of course because of their addictive nature this is quite small (cigarettes are price inelastic). There has always been a debate about whether the large excise duty is there to deter consumption or just to raise tax revenue. To be fair, the government has spent a lot of money over the years on anti-smoking propaganda and forcing cigarette manufacturers to display ever stronger messages about the negative health effects of smoking. And now cigarettes must be hidden away from public view in shops and supermarkets. Let's hope it works - although it will make it harder for our students to model the effects of these non-quantitative factors. But that will just make it a more interesting task!

Friday, 5 April 2013

Gender balance

The recent 2013 Royal Economic Society conference, held at Royal Holloway University of London, included a special session organised by the Womens Committee called State of Play: Female Economists in Academia, Business and Government. Professor Karen Mumford of the University of York gave a presentation on the Relative Position of Female Economists in UK Academia, while Bronwyn Curtis from the Society of Business Economists led on Women in Business and Helen Carrier from the Government Equalities Office led on Women in the Government Economic Service. As I wasn't at the conference I can't report on what was said at these sessions, but I have had a look at some of Professor Mumford's papers and I will identify some key points from one of them later in this blog post.

There is also an interesting paper by some American economists (Hsieh, C-T el al), recently made available via the National Bureau of Economic Research, which I found via a story in the Wall Street Journal by David Wessel. The key point of the Hsieh et al paper is that a large part of the growth in productivity in the US economy between 1960 and 2008 can be linked to the removal of barriers that had previously blocked white women, and blacks of both genders, in the labour market. The authors go on to argue that although great progress has been made, there are still huge gender imbalances at the top level of industry and commerce. Only 14% of the Fortune 500 CEOs are female. This is despite the fact that in 2011 more than 57% of bachelors degrees went to women, 51% of doctorates, 47% of law degrees and 45% of business Masters.

I thought it would be interesting to see if I could find similar relevant data for the UK. At the HEFCE website I found data on the number of male and female students in HEIs at different levels and in various subject area. Overall 56% of undergraduates are now female, and they form the majority in modern foreign languages (66.5%), Arts, humanities and social sciences (62.3%) and clinical subjects (59.3%). Males still dominate in engineering, computer science, mathematics and physics. [The detailed data can be found in Table 2.7 which is part of a downloadable Excel file].

I couldn't find a source for the number of women in CEO positions in the UK but this is where some of the Mumford research can help a bit. A paper that she wrote with Marie Drolet in 2010 looks at gender earnings differentials for private sector employees in Canada and Britain. In both countries men typically earn 26-28% more than women (measured by average hourly wages), although it varies a bit by age group which could be down to differences in educational attainment. Sure enough when a semi-logarithmic wage equation was estimated that controlled for factors such as educational attainment, age, marital status, ethnic group etc., the differential came down to about 14% in Britain and 16% in Canada. Given equal opportunities legislation which is in force in both countries this is still quite shocking.

I wondered if any analysis of the student body had been undertaken at USE and was pleased to find that in 2009 an Equality and Diversity Report had been produced. Here are some key findings. The number of male and female students at USE is roughly 50% for each gender, which proportions are pretty much the same in terms of applications. However for HEIs in the South East of England overall there are now more female students - they made up 59% of the student body in 2006-07.

What was interesting though was how the students performed. At USE a greater proportion of females progress to the next stage of study without referrals or trailing modules. A higher proportion of male students were excluded (two and a half times as many males as females), and a greater proportion of females obtained "good" degrees (First and Upper Seconds) as males. Employment prospects were better for females too. Twice the proportion of male graduates were unemployed as females.

I went back to the HEFCE web site to see if I could find out how many female Vice Chancellors there are. Alas, I couldn't get this information, I did notice that all the recent appointments listed there are males. Clearly there is some way to go yet before this glass ceiling is lifted.

Thought for the Day

The talk in the cafeteria all week has been about what the university chaplain, Luke Desmond, would talk about when he did the Thought for the Day spot on BBC Radio 4 today.

Would he focus on the topic of austerity economics? Or the new welfare "reforms"? Or the so-called bedroom tax and the new measures to help people wanting to buy a house? Issues of inequality and social harmony could be the theme. Or maybe issues about the continued development aid Britain provides to India? Perhaps he would ask questions about the problems of the Eurozone and what Cyprus and Germany should be doing? Or maybe he would choose the government's stance on immigration, looking particularly at how it affects foreign students coming to Britain to study. Or the lack of jobs for young school leavers and graduates? Or what UKIP stands for? Another option could be to pick up on Paolo Di Canio's appointment as manager at Sunderland or the far right groups in Greece, raising again the spectre of Fascism in Europe.

Or perhaps he would ask questions about the government's changes to the school curriculum? Or the privatisation of the NHS? Possibly he would identify issues in the Middle East and especially Syria, with the religious divisions between different Islamic groups. Or the international tensions brought about by the North Koreans? Or Argentina's renewed claims to the Falkland Islands?

Another possibility might be a discussion about human mortality following Iain Bank's announcement that he was terminally ill with cancer. Or could he talk about the evil streak that some people have, linking it to what happened in Derby when Mick Philpott set fire to his house. Or the weather and links to climate change and the effect on the jet stream?

Or maybe he would focus more on church matters now that there is both a new Pope and a new Archbishop of Canterbury - perhaps linking it to gay marriage or the perception amongst some Christians that they are under attack from a secular state? Or our place in the universe - science and religion - Richard Dawkins and all that.

Well if you heard him this morning you will know what he said. And if you missed it you can always catch up with it on iPlayer. Or, if you just want to read what he said rather than hear the spoken version you can read on.

"Good morning John, good morning Evan, good morning everyone."

"When it became known at the university that I had been asked to appear on the Thought for the Day spot there was a lot of speculation about what I would want to talk about. Would I focus on the topic of austerity economics? Or the new welfare "reforms"? Or the so-called bedroom tax and the new measures to help people wanting to buy a house? Issues of inequality and social harmony could be the theme. Or maybe issues about the continued development aid Britain provides to India? Perhaps I would ask questions about the problems of the Eurozone and what Cyprus and Germany should be doing? Or maybe I would choose the government's stance on immigration, looking particularly at how it affects foreign students coming to Britain to study. Or the lack of jobs for young school leavers and graduates? Or what UKIP stands for? Another option for me could be to pick up on Paolo Di Canio's appointment as manager at Sunderland or the far right groups in Greece, raising again the spectre of Fascism in Europe.

Or perhaps I would ask questions about the government's changes to the school curriculum? Or the privatisation of the NHS? Possibly I would identify issues in the Middle East and especially Syria, with the religious divisions between different Islamic groups. Or the international tensions brought about by the North Koreans? Or Argentina's renewed claims to the Falkland Islands?

Another possibility for me might be a discussion about human mortality following Iain Bank's announcement that he was terminally ill with cancer. Or I could talk about the evil streak that some people have, linking it to what happened in Derby when Mick Philpott set fire to his house. Or the weather and links to climate change and the effect on the jet stream?

Or maybe I would focus more on church matters now that there is both a new Pope and a new Archbishop of Canterbury - perhaps linking it to gay marriage or the perception amongst some Christians that they are under attack from a secular state? Or our place in the universe - science and religion - Richard Dawkins and all that".

"The thing is these are all important matters, but how do you prioritise them? So I decided not to pick out any of these topics as the focus of my talk. Instead I want us all to think about what we can do personally in our lives today to make things better for those people with whom we come into contact. Let's all live together in harmony whatever our religious or political beliefs, skin colour, ethnic group, gender, even fashion preferences!

"Let us remember what St Paul said in his first letter to the Corinthians '..though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love'."

Thursday, 4 April 2013

University software

Along with everyone else in the Faculty I got an email this morning from Dave Starr, the Faculty Learning and Teaching Champion, reminding us that if we want any new software to be available to be used in the next academic year (starting in September) we would need to fill in the relevant form and submit it to the Learning and Teaching Committee for consideration at its next meeting at the beginning of the summer term. Only software approved by this committee would be ordered and it would take time for the IT people to install it on the university network. Of course the form that we need to fill in, like many other university forms, never quite seems to have been designed to reflect the needs of users. Mike Rowe, our Head of Department, has also insisted that all applications from the department go through him first as the payment will come out of the departmental budget, not that of Learning and Teaching.

There are three categories of software that the university allows on its computers. 1 University wide software such as the VLE, Microsoft Office products, the email client and bibliographical referencing software. These are the only software products that the IT section agrees that it will fully support. 2 Specialist software needed for teaching and learning in specific subject areas. For example, in our department this would be econometric software, some computer algebra software and the instructional and quiz software that we use to accompany the basic micro and macroeconomics teaching. 3 Specialist software used by staff in the research or consultancy activities.

Any problems that staff or students have in using software in the second category will not be addressed by the IT section, but will be referred to the person who placed the order and who is assumed to have the relevant expertise to deal with requests for help. Even with the fully supported software you don't always get help straightaway when there is a problem. I can remember several occasions when I phoned the Help Desk to ask about a problem I was having with the VLE only to be given the reply "This is a known problem"! To be fair the VLE is a very clunky product and full of bugs.

A problem that we tend to get with the second category of software relates to differences of opinion withing the department as to which package is best for use in teaching. For example Gus Johns swears by Oxmetrics software for teaching econometrics whereas some younger members of staff favour EViews or Stata. Similarly a while ago we developed some interactive microeconomics material using Mathcad, but more recent appointments favour other computer algebra tools like Maple and Mathematica. Mike is reluctant to let us all have whichever package we like best so compromises have to be reached which is not always easy. Also, he quite rightly argues, you can't expect students to cope with a different package each time they move on to a new module.

Some people are unwilling to give up using the software that they have become familiar with. I am told that it took several years for Gavin Alexander to stop using WordPerfect after the university had decided to switch to MS Word. He also wanted to carry on using WinEcon rather than adopt Aplia as had been agreed by the department.

Another point of contention is which browser we should use. The Microsoft product Internet Explorer is the default browser, but the more nerdy members of the university want to use Firefox. And then there is the whole issue of Windows/Intel software versus software for the Mac computers.

The university wants us to put all our teaching material inside the walled garden of the VLE, rather than put it up on the web for anyone to access. We are supposed to make use of the wiki and other tools that come with the VLE rather than using free online and web based tools like PBWorks. They also say that we must only communicate electronically with students via the university's email system. The problem with that is that the students prefer to use their Google or Hotmail accounts and don't often look at their official university email. Many of us think that the official university stance is not only wrong, but is unsustainable. Students themselves are communicating with each other via Facebook, messaging and using other social networking and Web 2.0 tools. They are looking for interesting apps for their mobiles and instructional videos on YouTube. As Steve Wheeler has argued students will develop their own Personalised Learning Environments and engage in Collaborative Learning via the cloud rather than getting trapped in an institutionally controlled VLE. You can see his lecture on Future Learning Environments online.

I will finish by passing on a story that Gus Johns told me. About a decade ago the then Head of the IT section, Archie McDonald, reacted strongly to a communication from Microsoft informing him about their new software licensing and payment arrangements which involved a massive price hike. He organised a meeting with the IT Directors at some other universities where they formulated a joint response, saying that unless Microsoft modified its position they would be forced to look for alternative software options. Then, one afternoon, he had a phone call from a woman Microsoft employee from America. The story goes that at one point in the conversation the woman said to him "Tell me, Mr McDonald, are you a communist?". "No dear", he replied, "I'm a Scot!"

Wednesday, 3 April 2013

Stand-up economist

I see from his website that Dr Yoram Bauman, the self-proclaimed "world's first and only stand-up economist" will be over in the UK in May as part of his new "Neo-Keynesian Kickstarter tour".

It is almost a year to the day since Bauman was here at USE with his stand-up routine (and also to give a more standard staff seminar the following day). Bauman, who is a faculty member at the University of Washington and a specialist environmental economist, first came to prominence as a stand-up at the February 2007 meeting of the American Economic Association where he cleverly deconstructed the chapter headings of the best selling economics textbook "Principles of Economics" by Gregory Mankiw. Since then he has developed a routine that he takes around the world to conferences, economics departments and stand-up comedy venues.

His session here at USE included a reprise of his 10 Principles of Economics routine and also some very funny analysis of the sometimes weird comments that have been posted on YouTube next to the video of his original talk. Having captured his audience's attention he then neatly squeezed in some very serious and telling points about environmental economics and climate change.

Bauman has also written, with the help of illustrator Grady Klein, two economics comic books - one on microeconomics and one on macroeconomics.. If you are a student, particularly if you are studying economics but not as an economics major, you can probably learn as much economics from these books as from any standard textbook.

His latest cartoon book, just out, is the Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change which will cover the science, impacts, and policy of global warming. As with the other books he takes a tough subject and makes a fun and accessible cartoon book that everybody can relate to and learn from.

If you haven't seen his stand-up videos or want to find out more about his coming books just visit his website at http://standupeconomist.com/

Tuesday, 2 April 2013

Scrutinizing Exam Papers

Our Head of Department Mike Rowe has made us go back to the full meeting of all staff in the department to scrutinize the exam papers this year. In recent years we have been split into small sub-panels to look at groups of related papers - for example Richard Gardener chaired the sub-panel dealing with the papers for econometrics and other quantitative modules, while Mike himself took charge of the microeconomics and industrial organization modules.

The sub-panel approach had the advantage of efficiency in that we weren't all tied up in a day long meeting as we shall be again this year. But Mike is right in arguing that it is important for all staff to see all the questions that have been set for all the modules that we teach. Otherwise there is a danger that we won't be fully conscious of what students are being expected to know about right across the degree programme.

Whichever system we use the meetings can be tedious. We have to remember the protocols that the university has laid down for the use of quotations and quotation marks, the clear indication of the marks available for each question and sub-part of a question etc. And it is now required that as well as the exam paper itself you must supply indicative answers or, in the case of the quantitative subjects, full answers. To be fair it is really important that the questions on the quantitative papers really do have feasible solutions . There have been occasions in the past when students have been faced with a question that doesn't work out and invigilators have had to get hold of the lecturer who set the question to come and sort it out on the spot. Not ideal.

We also now have to submit a resit or referral paper for our modules at the same time as the main paper. This is to avoid a situation where the resit date arrives and there is no exam paper ready because the module leader has forgotten about it and might now be on leave or away from the university for some other reason.

Unfortunately these meetings do provide the opportunity for the more pedantic members of staff to indulge themselves, picking on the incorrect use of apostrophes, semi-colons and other grammatical niceties. They also make sure that we don't make use of words or phrases that might not be easily understood by a student whose first language is not English (or even a student for whom it is!). Students should, of course, be able to recognise well-established terms in particular subjects and sometimes there have been disputes as to what these might be. Richard has tried to prepare two lists - one of words that people have tried to use that are not acceptable and one of terms that students should know about. I will put some of these that I can remember at the end of this post.

We have to avoid questions that could be answered simply by the words "Yes" or "No" such as "Do you agree that austerity policies are the wrong way to go about tackling a budget deficit in a recession?". Often this can be done by the addition of a second sentence that says something like "Show clearly your reasoning and provide references to relevant contributions to the literature".

Whichever type of meeting we work with you can guarantee that there will be some lecturers who fail to provide their draft examination papers in time - the people that Molly refers to as "the usual suspects". This is really annoying as it means that there has to be Chairs' Action to deal with these papers. With the sub-panel approach this could mean one member of staff who has had to chair the sub-panel chasing up a colleague over whom they have no authority. At least with the full meeting approach it will be the Head of Department dealing with these cases.

We used to have a requirement that the draft papers were also sent to the External Examiners for scrutiny. But the university, in its wisdom, decided that this wasn't really necessary, This is something that rankles with some of our Externals who think that it should be part of their job to check that the exam papers reflect the learning objectives set for each module. And this should occur at a stage in the process when action can be taken to change things rather than just leaving them to make comments after the event. As with many things at the university at some point the powers that be will decide to change things back to how they were before. Gus says that if you stay here long enough at USE you will see the regulations cycle from one thing to another and then back again.

Some lecturers try to insert little in jokes or references to their favourite football player into their questions which is a bit naughty as it can distract students who recognise the reference and erroneously think that they should comment on them in their answers. For example I noticed that one of last year's papers asked students to compare the properties of two different utility functions for consumers called respectively Terry and Ferdinand.

In some subjects the lecturer has moved entirely or in large part to multiple choice questions. While I can understand the pressure to simplify the marking process for a module for which a large number of students are registered, and it may be OK at first year level, I don't think that it is really appropriate for more advanced level modules where we need to assess students' critical awareness.

Let me end with some of the word and phrases on Richard's two lists:

1 Acceptable words or phrases: adverse selection, cointegrated, disintermediation, externality, fiscal drag, free-rider, Laffer curve, laissez-faire, marginal propensity, normative, per capita, principal agent, regression.

2 Unacceptable words that we have ruled out in previous meetings: cogent, cognisant, cursory, efficacious, immutable, predisposition, propitious, substantiate (although there was quite an argument over this word). You can see why the meetings can last a long time as it can take over half an hour to get people to agree on which list a word should appear!

Monday, 1 April 2013

Student stunts

I was having a coffee in the cafeteria with Gus Johns the other day when Bob Bunn came in to get himself a coffee to take away. Bob is an ex Head of Department, retired for some years now, but still doing some part-time teaching for us. Gus and Bob exchanged pleasantries and Bob left to go to a class.

Gus looked across at me and smiled. "I will never forget Bob's 60th birthday" he said. The students had heard that it was his birthday and organised a policewoman strippergram to come to his big microeconomics lecture. Apparently when she had first entered the lecture theatre Bob froze in alarm, mid-sentence. Some people wondered if he hadn't immediately realised that the woman was not a real police office. Maybe he had concerns that something bad he had done had been discovered. Anyway, it very quickly became clear what her real purpose was as she said "Dr Bunn, you have been a very naughty boy" and started to removed her clothing. The students, of course, yelped with delight. The woman then started to try to hold on to Bob, who pulled himself away and said "Enough of this. Please stop". Eventually one of the more responsible students who could see that Bob was quite distressed about the whole thing ushered the woman out of the door. Bob said, "OK, lecture over" and stormed out. Later he read the riot act to the students and said he didn't want anything like that to be even contemplated in the future.

"Oh, we have had a few student stunts over the years" said Gus, who then proceeded to tell me about some of them. One, dating back to the late 1970s, involved a huge plastic spider that the students had rigged up on an elaborate pulley system just above where the lecturers stood to deliver the lecture. At a certain point in the lecture one of the students would activate the pulley and move the spider right above the lecturer's head. When the students started to laugh the poor unfortunate lecturer (usually a young inexperienced one) would start to panic thinking that his flies were undone, or that he had rubbed chalk on his face.

Then there were the times when a student would get into the control room at the back of the lecture theatre and use the controls to move the blackboards about remotely (often to reveal a message written up beforehand on the rear blackboard) or just to gradually dim the room lights. All pretty harmless really, but designed to unsettle a hesitant lecturer.

Another thing that students have done more recently is to slip an extra slide or two into a lecturer's Power Point presentation. Some of the econometrics lectures were scheduled as two hour double lectures, but of course with a break at the halfway point where people could leave the lecture room for ten minutes to have a coffee or a smoke. At this midpoint the lecturer concerned left the room without logging out of the computer system. So it was easy for the students to introduce a couple of slides that would get displayed during the second hour. One showed some glamorous looking women with the caption "Econometric Models" . Another displayed the photo of a lecturer who was not well loved by the students with the caption "Biased".

Gus said that he remembered another occasion some years earlier when a group of students tried to catch the attention of Dr Bell from the Maths department who was giving some second year lectures in statistics. Apparently Bell had a reputation for avoiding any eye contact with students. He would enter the lecture room and immediately start to cover the blackboard with theorems and diagrams. He would keep this up for the entire lecture with his back towards the students and not so much even a glance at them to see if they were understanding what he was doing. Then at the end of the lecture he would quickly leave the room in case anybody tried to ask him a question. So one week four of the students hired fancy dress costumes - one was a clown, another was Superman, and they all sat together right up in the front row. They felt sure that Dr Bell would see them out of the corner of his eye and have to make some comment. They were wrong. Whilst the entire class was waiting to see when he would spot the dressed up students, as usual Dr Bell ploughed on relentlessly and left without a comment. It was after this, Gus said, that the department decided it would be better to get the stats lectures given by a quantitative economist from within the department.

Gus's final story didn't relate to USE at all, but to the University of Warwick back in the 1960s when Gus went there to be interviewed for a place on the undergraduate degree. After the individual interviews, a guided tour of the campus and a nice lunch, the prospective students were asked all to go to a lecture room where they would have a talk from the Head of Department and there would be an opportunity to ask questions. Gus said that after a few minutes a man in his early thirties, well dressed in a suit and tie, came into the room. He introduced himself as Professor Graham Pyatt and said it was nice to see us all here and hoped that quite a few of us would be back here in October to start the course which, he claimed, was second to none in the country. He then said that as modern economics courses did require some knowledge of mathematics, particularly algebra, he was going to give us a short maths test to see if we would be able to cope or not. He distributed the test papers and then said that he had to just pop out for a few minutes. He would trust us not to cheat while he was out of the room. Off he went and we started to look at the questions in front of us. The first few were fine. Gus remembers that one was something of the form Y=100+0.8Y - solve for Y. Another had two simultaneous equations in P and Q that you had to solve. Perfectly sensible problems that an economics student might have to deal with. But when he turned the paper over it was immediately obvious to him that he next question was a bit different. Effectively they were being asked to prove Fermat's last theorem. It was at this point that another man in his early thirties entered the room. "Good afternoon everyone, my name is Professor Pyatt and I am the Head of Department". Then, seeing that we were all engaged looking at our test papers he said "Hello, what is going on here?" Looking at the questions he said that we had been the victims of a student prank. He had been stopped along the corridor by a group of students just long enough for his entrance to be delayed giving time for one of the mature students to come and impersonate him. He said that he hoped it hadn't spooked us too much and was actually a sign of how good relations were between staff and students at Warwick. Many of the lecturers were still quite young and identified very closely with the students. Gus said that this was certainly borne out by his experience at Warwick.

Gus then went on to say that when he first came to USE and was given the responsibility of teaching the first year quantitative methods course he made use of a simple maths during the first week of the course to help him establish exactly what maths students knew and to help him identify students who might need extra help. As happened in those days the test was typed up by Sally, one of the secretaries. There were 30 short questions in the test and Gus said that he asked Sally to try the test. He said that she got a score of 8 and he used this as the benchmark to identify real problem students. Anyone who couldn't get 8/30 would definitely need help!

Of course the stunts that students play on each other are often more extreme than what they do to lecturers. They do things like putting cling film over toilet seats so that someone going to the loo half asleep in the middle of the night would get a nasty surprise. Or after a drunken night you might wake up to find your head has been shaved. Another thing I have heard of is blue dye being put into shampoo or Deep Heat in people's underpants. Ouch!