Writing Assignment 1. Due Thursday May 22, 5pm.
Your friend tells you that she wants to graduate from university with the most prestigious degree she can get, but that she’s happy to just scrape through (with “a gentleman’s C”) because employers don’t actually care what you learned, they just use the qualification to screen applicants. Write a blog post giving your opinion on the issue, and your reasons for it.
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Notes:
1. Feel free to express any opinion you like: marks will be on the quality of the arguments and of the writing, not on the side you pick. Try to think about the issues yourself for a bit before looking for ideas on line. This not only helps you engage the material better yourself, it also ensures you will have put at least some ideas into your own words, which is very important.
2. Suggested length: 1 page minimum; your choice on maximum, but this is a blog post so don’t go crazy or no-one will read it!
3. If you are referencing someone else’s ideas, you need to cite appropriately. This being a blog post, hyperlinks to other websites are a standard and entirely appropriate citation method, but more formal blog posts often also cite using standard methods from academia (see, eg: Mark Thoma ).
4. Submission is to the dropbox on MyLS (opening soon). I will post an evaluation rubric, which will be fairly basic.
5. I’ll also open a discussion thread on the paper – you can feel free to throw around ideas (if anyone makes use of someone else’s ideas from a discussion thread, you should appropriately reference them!), and/or post your blog post if you want to.
Since some people don’t know what blog posts actually are or look like, here are links to some economics blogs I read from time to time:
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative
Paul Krugman
Echidne of the Snakes
Econbrowser
Marginal Revolution
