Review:
Professor Downes is a nice guy who is understanding, very concerned with each student's progress, and -from what I've heard from his advisees- a great econ advisor... but that doesn't mean he teaches well.

Downes' EC13 is the most excruciatingly boring econ class I've ever taken at Tufts. His lectures were dry and filled with poorly explained formulas, few of which were ever necessary to know, even for exams. He made the concepts incredibly difficult to pick up on (forget fully understanding them) and none of this helped at all in motivating students to get up for the class, which was at the unearthly time of 8:30am. He was also incredibly inarticulate (though I heard he wasn't that bad back when EC13 wasn't a huge lecture course). And while he set up a plan for what would be discussed each class, he almost always ended class late and had to try and catch up the next day. As a result, the last topics in the syllabus were rushed; and even better, they made up the majority of the final.

Professor Downes is one of the most caring professors at Tufts... he just doesn't teach that well.

Workload:
Problem sets every week, and annoyingly, often overlapping and on topics first taught the days the p-sets were due.

2 midterms and a final (cheat sheets allowed).

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