The Cornell Suite of Economic Assessments

Overview

The Cornell Suite is a set of standard assessments that can be used by economics instructors to evaluate student skills at the beginning and end of the term in many economics courses.

The following ten tests from the Cornell Suite of Economics Assessments are available now:

  • PESA-Micro, the Principles of Economics Skills Assessment for Microeconomics
  • PESA-Macro, the Principles of Economics Skills Assessment for Macroeconomics
  • MESA-Foundations, the Mathematics for Economics Skills Assessment, appropriate for introductory courses
  • MESA-Intermediate, the Mathematics for Economics Skills Assessment, appropriate for intermediate-level courses
  • ESSA, the Economic Statistics Skills Assessment
  • AESA, the Applied Econometrics Skills Assessment
  • AESA-Core, the Applied Econometrics Skills Assessment, Core Skills
  • IESA-Micro, the Intermediate Economics Skills Assessment for Microeconomics
  • IESA-Macro, the Intermediate Economics Skills Assessment for Macroeconomics appropriate for intermediate-level courses
  • AMA, the Academic Mindset Assessment

Learn more about the assessments that make up the Cornell Suite at (econ-assessments.org)[https://econ-assessments.org/pages/what.html]

Our Development Process

Our assessment development process is in large part based on the procedure described in Adams and Wieman (2011). The first step is to document the learning goals we want to test and draft a set of corresponding multiple-choice questions. We then recruit faculty here and outside Cornell to provide us with feedback on whether the assessment evaluates expert-level thinking. Following revisions, we conduct interviews with undergraduate students who have previously taken the course where they verbalize their thought process as they answer the questions. Based on these interviews, we remove ambiguity in questions and add options that correspond to common mistakes.

At the end of the process, our assessments are piloted internally and externally in real classrooms. This allows us to compute standard measures of test quality and report national mean performance overall and by learning goal.

Learning Goals

As noted above, the skills being evaluated by the Cornell Suite are carefully documented as part of the assessment development process. These skills (aka the Learning Goals being evaluated) usually correspond to a subset of the learning goals of an economics course and are written for three distinct audiences:

  • Course instructors: The learning goals will form the basis of the lectures we design and the exams we give.
  • Instructors who teach more advanced courses: The learning goals explain what incoming students know (or should know) when they walk in the door.
  • Students in the class: The learning goals provide a clear exposition of what they will learn from the course.

The devil is in the details with learning goals—There’s a big difference between a topic you might see on a syllabus like “Instrumental Variables” and the following learning goals that describe a particular set of skills students should acquire:

  • Judge situations where Instrumental Variables (IV) can and cannot be applied to obtain an unbiased coefficient estimate.
  • Explain why IV estimation (using two stage least squares) yields unbiased estimates.
  • Evaluate whether the instrumental variable is correlated with the endogenous variable and assess its strength.
  • Evaluate whether the instrumental variable is correlated with the error term.

The topic is often meaningless to incoming students while the learning goals are much easier to turn into a lecture or assess in an exam. You can request copies of any of the questionnaires and learning goals for any of the assessments in the Cornell Suite at econ-assessments.org.