Principles of Finance 1 (BUS 2203) at UoPeople

Last term I took BUS 2203 (Principles of Finance I). I will tell you up front that it’s an extremely hard and demanding course. I felt that it was a combination of Microeconomics + Macroeconomics with some additional financial theories, terms, models, and concepts. You learn about things like money, banking, the financial system, banking system, interest rates, bonds, monetary policies, various spreads, yields, curves, investments, risks, equities, financial crises, foreign exchange, various theories, supply and demand models, frameworks, tools, and so on.

Initially, it was a big class with over 30+ students, but the number decreased to only 22 by the end of the term. My instructor was very young and recently finished his MBA in 2020. This was his first time teaching at the UoPeople. He was a decent guy and tried to participate in discussion forums, though he didn’t participate in all of them. He posted weekly updates and was a lenient marker on the learning journals. I didn’t contact him for the unfair peer assessment I received as it wouldn’t have changed the final grade I received in the course. I’m certain he would have changed the grade because he told us to email him if we weren’t happy about it. However, he didn’t change the grades on his own like some Godzilla instructors I’ve talked about; neither I was expecting him to as being a first-time instructor; he was just learning the ropes of the school.

For this course, the discussion and written assignments are worth a whopping 50%. So, if your instructor isn’t understanding and if your classmates are experts of unfair peer assessment, then expect to see a low grade for this course, leading to your GPA eventually coming down. The two graded quizzes are worth 20% (10%+10%), the final exam 20%, and the learning journals 10%. For the discussion assignments, you have to answer a question or two. Sometimes they require plenty of research and critical thinking. You have to write 7 written assignments straight for 7 weeks without a break. They are extremely difficult, overwhelming, and time-consuming because they require a great deal of reading, research, critical thinking, and sometimes math.

To be honest, this is the only course I’ve taken thus far at the UoPeople whose written assignments I found extremely daunting and challenging. Sometimes you have to read a very long paper, others you have to go to a website like NYSE and talk about their products and elements like bonds and investments, etc. Some other times you have to solve a financial function, and at others talk about the consequences of monetary policy tools, and so on. For the learning journals, you have to read a chapter from the book each week and write a summary about it. Speaking of the book, it was exceptionally dull and old. It was published in 2009 and had no idea about what has happened in the world since then. I actually borrowed one book from my local library and found another online which I found handier and more useful. Those books are Financial Markets and Institutions 7th Edition and Principles of Finance. You're required to read plenty of chapters from the assigned book each week; sometimes 3 to 4 chapters. You can tally the chapters/topics from the book with other resources like the books I mentioned and read from there if you find the assigned book uninteresting. 

As for the graded quizzes, most of the questions come from the non-graded quizzes and whatever you have learned in your readings. To prepare for them, I suggest first consulting your notes and taking non-graded quizzes before taking the graded ones. Each graded quiz had 20 questions and you’ve to do it in 30mins. The questions also involve some math, so keep a calculator nearby.

The final exam was a totally different ball game. It’ll probably screw you up. One thing I despise about the exams at UoPeople is that they don’t tell you beforehand about the number of questions you’ll get tested on in the quizzes and finals. I once asked this question from an instructor and he told me that he didn’t have access to the final exam and the course committee set it up and prepared it. Knowing in advance how many questions there will be in the final helps me plan how much time I need to spend on a problem and not exceed it to finish the entire exam in time. But alas, this information isn't available, even to the instructors.

The final exam of this course had 50 questions with a lot of math, and you have to do it only in 1 hour! I wasn’t expecting so many questions with calculations with only a 60-minute time limit. The final was worth 20% but I don’t understand the rationale behind 50 questions which the students might not even finish in such a limited time. The final exam involved questions where you have to calculate the value of bonds, investments, present value, stocks, growth rate, aggregated supply and demand curves, IS-LM, and yields after the given time. I barely finished the final and got 17.30/20 on it. To tell you the truth, it really surprised me. To prepare for it, I obviously will suggest reading all your notes and doing all the non-graded and graded quizzes, and the final review quiz. On top of that, I will especially suggest that you know the mathematical equations and are aware of how to calculate the aforementioned values after the given time. I would recommend doing practice exams and questions here and here if you wish to do well on the final. Good luck!

In the end, I got an A by a very small margin. I’m very pleased with the effort I had put into my assignments, quizzes, exam, and overall work. It was probably the hardest I had to work on in a course. I was graded unfairly twice, but my grade would’ve remained the same even if I got full marks for my work, so I chose not to bring it to my instructor’s attention. TL;DR, it's a very hard course, and you've to work extremely hard to do well in it.