Do We Teach Students to 'Think Like Economists'?

Abstract

This paper tries to shed light on the question "do economics majors learn to 'think like economists'?" by investigating an unusual data set consisting of student evaluations of other students' research papers. The way the data set was collected minimizes incentives for students to grade strategically, to give their friends higher grades and so forth. The range of student-assigned grades is extremely wide. A number of hypotheses about the relation between student-assigned and faculty-assigned grades are tested. The paper's major finding is that, despite this wide range, there is a clear positive association between student-assigned and faculty-assigned grades.

JEL Classification: A22