What does ECON1101 Microeconomics 1 assess at UNSW?

Direct answer: ECON1101 Microeconomics 1 is a 6-unit-of-credit undergraduate course at UNSW Sydney, classed under the Economics field of education. Students in BCom single or double degrees are generally excluded from enrolling, apart from two named combined programs, so check your own program before planning around it.

The University of New South Wales (2026a) lists ECON1101 Microeconomics 1 in its course handbook at 6 Units of Credit, taught in Terms 1, 2 and 3. Microeconomics studies how individuals and firms choose, and the overview says the course examines "how people, businesses, and governments make decisions with limited resources, and how those choices affect society" (University of New South Wales, 2026a).

The same handbook page records an enrolment exclusion: students in BCom single or double-degree programs, except 3155 Actl/Comm and 3521 Comm/Econ, are not allowed to enrol. It also lists WBUS1000, COMM1100 and DPBS1101 among its exclusion courses, so the course suits students from outside a BCom program who want an economics foundation.

Scale shapes the course. UNSW staff described Microeconomics 1 as one of the largest courses in the former Australian School of Business, with around 2,500 students a year (Phys.org, 2014), which explains why assessment is delivered on a platform that marks automatically and gives feedback weekly. For a neighbouring course with its own outcomes, see the ECON1102 Macroeconomics 1 guide.

Direct answer: The 2026 handbook lists two assessments: Problem Sets worth 45% and a Final Exam worth 55%. The problem sets are weekly multiple-choice and short-answer questions on the Playconomics platform across the whole term. Confirm any date or format change in your own term's outline.

The University of New South Wales (2026a) describes the problem sets as "weekly sets of multiple choice and short answer questions, of which some involving playing a videogame", delivered "in an ongoing manner that spans the full duration of the term". The final exam is held in the University's examination period and "will evaluate students' understanding of the fundamental microeconomic principles and models covered in the course, by testing their ability to apply them in practice" (University of New South Wales, 2026a). Every assessment maps to all five learning outcomes.

Source: University of New South Wales (2026a), ECON1101 handbook entry, read 2026-10-27.

Two consequences follow. First, 45% of the mark arrives week by week, so a missed week is a real loss, unlike a course where one big exam decides everything. Second, a 2009 outline weighted a 15% in-class written submission and two 15% class tests (UNSW Australian School of Business, 2009), so advice written for that structure, such as rehearsing a few long written answers, no longer matches the handbook's description. The handbook page does not state each set's weekly weight or the exam's length and question types, so rely on the Moodle outline for those details.

Direct answer: The handbook lists five outcomes (CLO1 to CLO5): explain model assumptions, identify and apply models, articulate who benefits or is harmed by markets, evaluate government policy, and use basic mathematics to calculate effects. Each starts with a verb, so a marker rewards what you do with a model.

The University of New South Wales (2026a) words CLO2 as: "Identify appropriate economic models (e.g., models of perfectly competitive markets and various market imperfections) and apply them to analyse and predict the behaviour of individuals and firms interacting in markets." CLO5 asks you to "Use basic mathematical tools to demonstrate the properties and predictions of economic models and calculate the effect of changes in economic variables" (University of New South Wales, 2026a).

Source: University of New South Wales (2026a), learning outcomes CLO1 to CLO5, read 2026-10-27.

Because the handbook ties both assessments to all five outcomes, a single question can test several verbs at once. A price ceiling question, for example, asks you to apply a model (CLO2), calculate a shortage (CLO5), and say who gains and who loses (CLO3). The worked example below practises exactly that combination.

Direct answer: Students lose marks because opportunity cost is a net figure: the benefit of the best alternative minus its cost. Ferraro and Taylor (2005) found that only 21.6% of 199 economists answered their question correctly, so a wrong first instinct is normal and fixable.

Ferraro and Taylor (2005) asked a single question. You hold a free Eric Clapton ticket, Bob Dylan plays the same night, a Dylan ticket costs $40, and you would pay up to $50 to see him. The opportunity cost of seeing Clapton is $10, because you forgo $50 of benefit and avoid $40 of cost. Of 199 respondents, 27.6% chose $50, 25.6% chose $40, 25.1% chose $0 and 21.6% chose $10 (Ferraro & Taylor, 2005).

Their explanation is short: "An avoided benefit is a cost, and an avoided cost is a benefit." The same paper surveyed 358 undergraduates in the first week of an introductory course. Only 7.4% of the 270 students with earlier economics study answered correctly, against 17.2% of the 86 who had none (Ferraro & Taylor, 2005).

A distinction the usual summaries skip: the question is contested. Potter and Sanders (2012) argued that every answer is defensible under some opportunity cost accounting convention, because the item does not say whether benefit is measured gross or net. In a weekly problem set, that matters. Write your convention in one line ("I measure opportunity cost as the net value of the best alternative") before the number, so a marker can follow your reasoning even when the platform checks only the final figure.

Direct answer: Find the equilibrium, test whether the ceiling binds, read the quantity traded from the short side, then compute the shortage and the deadweight loss. With demand Qd = 90 - 3P and supply Qs = 3P - 30, a $16 ceiling gives a shortage of 24 units and a deadweight loss of $48.

Staples et al. (2020) analysed open-ended student explanations of supply and demand and reported that students often predict the change in equilibrium price correctly but make consistent errors in equilibrium quantity. The example below is built to make the quantity step visible. Take demand Qd = 90 - 3P and supply Qs = 3P - 30, with price in dollars.

1. Equilibrium. Set 90 - 3P = 3P - 30, so P = 20 and Q = 30. At that point price elasticity of demand is -3 x (20 / 30) = -2.
2. Does a $16 ceiling bind? It is below $20, so yes.
3. Quantities at $16. Qd = 90 - 48 = 42 and Qs = 48 - 30 = 18. The shortage is 42 - 18 = 24 units.
4. Quantity traded. Only 18 units exist, so trade is 18, not 42. This is the quantity error Staples et al. describe.
5. Prices at Q = 18. Inverse demand P = 30 - Q/3 gives $24, and inverse supply P = 10 + Q/3 gives $16.
6. Deadweight loss. The triangle has base 30 - 18 = 12 and height 24 - 16 = 8, so its area is 0.5 x 12 x 8 = $48.

Source: MAAS worked example built from the stated demand and supply equations.

Describe the diagram in words in your answer: the supply curve rises from $10, demand falls from $30, the ceiling line sits below their crossing, and the gap between the curves at 18 units is the lost value. The $48 is a minimum, because queueing would waste more surplus than efficient rationing does.

Direct answer: Practise retrieving answers from memory, then check them. Karpicke and Blunt (2011) tested 120 students and found 101 (84%) scored higher after retrieval practice than after concept mapping. Pair that with the weekly Playconomics sets, which already give feedback each week.

In that study 101 of the 120 students (84%) did better on the retrieval test, yet Karpicke and Blunt (2011) report that 90 of those 120 students (75%) predicted that concept mapping would work as well as or better than retrieval, so your sense of which method works is unreliable. Turn each week's lecture into questions and answer them closed-book before opening the notes.

Playconomics deserves its own plan. In a laboratory experiment with 81 UNSW undergraduates, Dobrescu et al. (n.d.) gave students one hour with either a textbook chapter or a game level on comparative advantage, then tested them with 8 multiple-choice and 5 essay questions. They found no evidence that game play produced lower exam performance than reading. In an interview with UNSW, Dr Alberto Motta said that "When we gamified 10% of the course, the final exam marks increased roughly by 10%" (UNSW Newsroom, 2016), which is the lecturers' own report, not an independent trial.

Graphs need deliberate practice. In a study of 579 German higher education students, Ring and Oberrauch (2024) found that tasks beyond simple graph operations were challenging, and that supply and demand and indifference curves were hardest. Repeating basic concepts across quizzes was also associated with slightly higher final exam scores in four semesters of a first-year economics course (Leggett et al., 2022). A short weekly loop works: redo last week's missed items, then add one new graph drawn from memory.