After my first encounter with the lack of enthusiasm that my students demonstrated, I decided to investigate if there was a role for me teaching economics. Perhaps, students lacked enthusiasm to study economics, because they already knew a lot about it (and spending more time studying it will inevitably only make them victims to the law of diminishing marginal utility).

So I gave my students a 5-question quiz, true and false, about the US economy. I found that, on average, students will answer 1.93 questions right (with 95% confidence +/- 0.3). This, of course, was unsatisfactory, because if I were to give the same survey to a group of chimpanzees (which I did), they would score higher (and they did — you can see them being happy for scoring higher on the right). The results did not suggest that students lacked knowledge about the US economy, but that their knowledge was biased and in most instances wrong.

Of course I was happy, because I found a good reason to teach, and even a better reason for my students to take my course.

*The results were even more striking when I gave the same quiz to graduate students in economics.

Results from the quiz (5 true/false questions)

Group	Mean	95% confidence interval
Students	1.93	+/- 0.3
Chimps	2.5
Econ Graduate Students	1.5