Final Exam — Instructions

Overview

This is the scored final exam for Principles of Microeconomics. It is cumulative: its questions reach all eight course objectives, from scarcity, opportunity cost, and positive and normative claims in Week 1 to market failure, behavioral economics, and the measurement of inequality in Weeks 14 and 15. It is given in Week 16, the finals week, which has no new module and no new material.

The final has 40 questions, and every question counts the same. Thirty-one ask you to select exactly one option, five ask you to select every option that applies, and four ask you to judge a statement true or false. Eleven questions are on the easier side, 22 are of medium difficulty, and 7 are harder. Every graph a question needs is described in words, and every demand or supply rule, cost or product table, revenue schedule, and payoff matrix it uses is written out in the question, so nothing depends on a picture or a color.

Each question asks for a skill you have already used in the weekly quizzes, lecture tutorials, and Model Workshops. You read a table one row at a time, apply the output or hiring rule that fits the seller, name the curve that moves and which way, measure a triangle of lost surplus, find a dominant strategy, or sort a claim as positive or normative. Many questions open with a short illustrative business or market, invented for the question and attributed to no real person or company. No question asks you to take a side in a policy debate.

Coverage and scope

The syllabus says the final gives the most weight to the second half of the course, Objectives 5 to 8, while still drawing on every first-half objective, Objectives 1 to 4. The questions were drawn from the course's question bank, and this form leans that way strongly. Thirty-nine of the 40 questions come from the material of Weeks 9 to 15, one comes from Week 7, and every one of the eight objectives appears at least once.

Thirty-one questions check Objectives 5 to 8, the objectives Weeks 9 to 15 introduce. The other 9 check Objectives 1 to 4. Eight of those sit inside a later week's material, the way that week called an early tool back, and one comes from Week 7 itself. Here is what this form actually contains, first by week and then by objective.

No question is drawn directly from the material of Weeks 1 to 6 or Week 8.

Each question checks exactly one objective, so the objective column adds to 40, the same as the week column.

Read the two tables together. Week 10 carries the most questions, 7, so the price taker's output rule, profit at a given price, the shutdown and break-even prices, and long-run entry and exit deserve the most review time. Weeks 11 and 14 come next with 6 each, then Weeks 9, 12, 13, and 15 with 5 each. By objective, perfect competition and monopoly (Objective 6) is by far the heaviest, with 12 questions across Weeks 10 to 12. Market failure, behavior, and inequality (Objective 8) follows with 7, and production and costs (Objective 5) and the Week 12 and 13 material (Objective 7) have 6 each.

Here is the ground each week taught. These are the topics the questions come from, not the questions themselves:

• Week 7: price ceilings and floors; the per-unit tax as a wedge between the buyer price and the seller price; economic incidence, and why the side less responsive to price bears more of a tax.
• Week 9: the short run and the long run; total, marginal, and average product and diminishing marginal returns; fixed, variable, total, average, and marginal cost; explicit and implicit costs; accounting profit against economic profit.
• Week 10: the traits of perfect competition and the price taker; marginal revenue equal to the price; the output rule P = MC; profit as a rectangle; the shutdown and break-even prices; long-run entry and exit and zero economic profit.
• Week 11: barriers to entry and natural monopoly; marginal revenue below the price; MR = MC with the price read from demand; monopoly profit and deadweight loss; the Lerner index; price discrimination; the antitrust laws as a named debate.
• Week 12: differentiated sellers and the long-run zero-profit result; oligopoly, collusion, and cartels; payoff matrices, dominant strategies, Nash equilibrium, and the prisoner's dilemma; the four market structures compared.
• Week 13: derived demand; the value of labor's marginal product and the hiring rule; movements along labor demand and shifts of it; labor supply and the market wage; human capital and compensating differentials; the minimum wage as a named debate.
• Week 14: negative and positive externalities; marginal social cost and the efficient quantity; an externality's deadweight loss; corrective taxes and subsidies; cap-and-trade; the Coase theorem; private goods, public goods, common resources, and club goods; carbon pricing as a named debate.
• Week 15: adverse selection, moral hazard, signaling, and screening; bounded rationality, loss aversion, present bias, anchoring, and defaults; the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient; inequality as a named debate; the term's synthesis.

The early objectives still count. Nine questions check Objectives 1 to 4, and eight of them sit inside a later week's material, the way those weeks called the early tools back. Week 9 priced an owner's own time and money as opportunity cost, the Week 1 idea. Week 11 measured monopoly's lost surplus with Week 6's triangles, and Week 14 did the same for an externality and brought back Week 7's per-unit tax as the fix. Week 13 ran the demand and supply model of Weeks 3 and 4 on a labor market. Week 15 sorted the term's debates into positive and normative claims, the Week 1 line. The ninth question comes from Week 7, where elasticity, the Week 5 idea, decides who bears a tax. No question comes from Week 8's own material, though its habit of thinking at the margin runs through every firm week.

These notes map the skills the final checks. The questions themselves are drawn from the course's question bank and are not listed here.

Instructions

• Attempts: one. The final is a single scored attempt.
• Time limit: there is no time limit. Take the time you need, as long as you submit before the exam closes.
• Window: the final opens in Week 16 and closes at the due time your instructor sets. Start early enough to finish comfortably inside that window.
• Navigation: the questions appear one at a time, and once you move on you cannot go back to an earlier question. Settle each one before you move to the next.
• Materials: every rule, table, schedule, and graph description a question needs is printed in the question. Scratch paper helps for writing a marginal row under a table, setting two lines equal, or laying out a triangle's base and height. The syllabus sets no rule on notes, calculators, or other materials, so follow what your instructor announces before the final opens.
• After you submit: Canvas shows your result. The keyed options stay hidden so the final stays fair for every student.

Academic integrity

The final is an individual, scored assessment, and it is closed to AI. Do not use a chatbot or any other AI tool, do not get help from another person, and do not share or post the questions during or after your attempt. The course syllabus closes the final to AI, requires it to be entirely your own work, and names using AI on the final as one of the three violations that matter most in this course. The final confirms that you personally can solve the models, read the graphs, and interpret the results.

The honest way to prepare is open to you. The study guide, the practice final, and the exam-prep tutorial rehearse the same skills with fresh variants, and nothing on them appears on the final word for word.

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