Brief Guide to the Assignment
Welcome to the coursework part of unit ACFI30008 Financial Crises! I know that you will enjoy the work and that you will learn a great deal of solid Finance as you do the work,
The Coursework Brief is a lengthy document that gives detailed guidance on the assignment requirements. Please make sure carefully to read and digest all parts of the document. The bullet points on page 1 of the Brief are core requirements, and the “Further Guidance” on pages 4-5 offer important additional advice.
Here I wish to highlight a few key items:
1. Coursework reflects class work
If you look at the tasks from the CW Brief, you can see that they directly reflects the work we did in lectures and classes. We study stylised numerical cases and derive a whole host of fundamental finance insights from our work with these cases. For all tasks of your assignment, the relevant sources are in the unit’s existing course materials on Blackboard.
You should work with my lecture slides and Notes, and with the class exercises and my comments on these exercises. We had one or two additional core readings: you may work with these too. There was a small list of additional background readings, and if you wish you can use these too. You are not meant to do additional external reading, or to find additional external sources.
Doing independent reading and finding new sources are important skills, there is a good reason why they form. a key part of many assessments. It just so happens that in our CW, in this unit, we want to focus on other skills. You are asked to work with the materials that you have, as given on Blackboard.
For this reason there is no need to add a reference list to your report.
2. Use your own brain
You are allowed to use spelling and grammar-checking tools, but otherwise the CW Brief rules out the use of genAI tools such as Copilot or ChatGPT. Don’t use these tools, your report will be better without them. Markers will be glad to accept minor grammatical errors and other language-related issues. Trust your own insights and your own expression, don’t trust a hallucinating machine.
3. Work with the cases
The CW is based on two stylised cases. These are described on pages 2-4 of the CW Brief. You want to work closely with these cases. A good essay will tell an interesting over-arching story, using fundamental analytical insights to make sense of these concrete cases.
4. Size limit
The assignment gives you a page limit, not word limit. You can safely ignore the word count of your word processor. The limit is 8-12 pages of a certain format. The format is precisely described in the CW Brief, in paragraph 3 of “Further Guidance” on page 4. Your are given a font, a font size, margin widths, and so on. Please adopt these suggestions exactly as stated in the CW Brief. This ensures that all reports are on an equal footing. With these layout rules, the 8-12 page limit broadly corresponds to a 3,000 word limit, but once again, you are asked to ignore the word count of your word processor.
5. Tables, Graphs, displayed equations
All such more complex elements of your text are counted as normal parts of your 8-12 pages. No material is to be placed in appendices. The only exception is the title page, which is not counted as one of the 8-12 pages.
Any graphics that you wish to include in your text should be produced by you, not copied from elsewhere. You may use graphs from Excel, or from some drawing software, or draw by hand. But don’t copy grpahs from other sources.
6. Selectivity
Different students will have different writing styles, but many of you will find that the limit of maximal 12 pages is quite tight. This is deliberate. You are meant to be selective in your presentation. You are also meant to give full and detailed explanations, so there is an in-built tension between depth of coverage and limitation of space. Such a tension leads to good writing. Be selective in what you include and what to leave out. Sometimes it makes sense to give full details on one aspect of the problem and then merely give summary result for the other aspects. The markers will be aware of the need to be selective and will reward bold editorial choices.
7. Spreadsheets
The course introduced you to Excel implementations of several of our models, both for bubbles and for mortgage securitisation. The CW Brief asks you to use these spreadsheets. Feel free to do so.
8. The Forum
The unit's asynchronous Discussion Forum (on Blackboard) remains open during the entire period of the assignment. You are welcome to raise substantive finance queries during that period, on the Forum. If you see a query from a fellow student, you are encouraged to provide tentative answers. I as lecturer will act as moderator, on a daily basis. I will either reply with follow-up questions, or I give direct answers myself. If there is a longer thread, I will make sure that we conclude with a clear summary.
Naturally, it would be wrong to have explicit discussions of specific aspects of the CW questions here on the Forum. Instead, you are invited to ask questions on substantive matters based on earlier cases from the lectures or classes.
Thus, don't post a query saying "How can I solve issue X from Q1 of the coursework": this would be wrong. But you are invited to post queries along the lines of "In Class W3, we did X, and I don't think I understand why we did it." I have had such an open forum in many of my units in the past, it has always worked well. If everyone uses this facility with care, there will be no concerns about collaboration.