Taking Risks An H&S professor shows that economics needn't be the "dismal" science. Principles of Microeconomics is perhaps not considered one of the liveliest of courses, but Professor Bill Kolberg has managed to jazz it up quite a bit, thanks to his own innovative computer software and some good old-fashioned motivational psychology. Here’s how it works. Each team of two students acts as a company. Every week they decide the price of their product (last semester it was blank VHS tapes) and the number of hours put in by their employees. As they learn new economic principles, Kolberg, like a behind-the-scenes wizard, changes the conditions they contend with, setting a new problem weekly for which they make decisions that will maximize their profits. Students get each week’s information off the Web, go to a computer lab, and open Kolberg’s Microanalyst Toolmaster program. There they find various graphs and tables that can help them make their decisions. It’s better than using tables in a book, says Kolberg, because the tables "don’t just lie there." You can change one factor and see what that does to the others. Then it’s back to the Web to enter the team’s decisions. Kolberg inserts those figures into another program he invented, Microanalyst Marketmaster. With it he generates a balance sheet, an income statement, and a market summary for each team. That’s where the motivational psychology comes in. The summary shows every team’s decisions, its profit-making rank in the class, and a dollar figure that’s not just pretend. Each student pays a $30 lab fee, refundable in proportion to the team’s capitalistic success or failure. If you don’t learn this stuff, you’re going to lose more than a good grade. It’s not just the dollars that motivate, though. "Being ranked high is more important to them than the money," says Kolberg. "The process of competition does so much for the class atmosphere. Material that could have been horribly boring becomes really lively." Kolberg doesn’t base students’ grades on their rank or dollar amount, because the best students aren’t necessarily the highest in rank. "Good students may take risks that don’t always pay off," he explains. Students have to show how they arrived at their decisions, and they have to take tests. You might say — all this high technology aside — that they get grades the old-fashioned way: they earn them. —Liz Holmes