Who Teaches College Economics? Students or Professors?

A value added panel and a larger posttest sample are applied to test hypotheses regarding the common influences on student performance on the TUCE III. Common influences, those shared by all students in a given classroom, included: day vs. night time of course; class size; peer effects; and teacher effects. Samples of 500 pre-test students and 400 post tests, collected over a three year period, were matched to the Registrar's student records, Admissions Office records, responses to a survey of the teachers and to department records. Operating by random chance, 76 pretest students were resampled on posttests, these form a value added panel. Complete data for posttest students included 232 cases.These researches find that: The observed beneficial effects on both value added and posttest TUCE III scores apparently due to the stimulus of the student's peers is most likely spurious, a reflection of the common influence of the teacher. Instead the largest influences on student success in economics are probably the teacher and the student's own intellectual human capital