Midterm Report

Midterm Report#

This course has no exams. In place of a midterm exam, the entire class collaboratively produces one shared, publication-style Midterm Report on the current economy and financial markets. Each student contributes one exhibit and one short write-up, and we assemble these into a single polished PDF.

This is also a practical exercise in the social coding workflow we cover in class: claiming work through an issue tracker, contributing through pull requests, reviewing other people’s work, and following a shared style guide so that many authors produce one coherent document.

What You Contribute#

Each student contributes, individually:

  • One figure that says something concrete about the economy or financial markets over the last 6 to 12 months, generated reproducibly by the repo’s pipeline.

  • One paragraph that explains the figure: what the data shows, why it matters, and what the reader should take away.

  • A citation that establishes the topic’s importance, such as a news article or research piece that discusses it.

Your contribution must follow the repo’s style guides so it integrates cleanly with everyone else’s work: CODE_STYLE.md for code organization, plus the report and chart style guides in reports/.

Workflow#

The report lives in a private GitHub repository, finm-32900/finm_midterm_report. Every student receives a collaborator invite by email.

  1. Claim an issue. Each open issue is a coverage area or a dataset, deliberately broad. The specific chart and angle are yours to choose. Assign the issue to yourself, one student per issue. You may also propose your own topic by opening a new issue and coordinating with me there.

  2. Build it reproducibly. Work on a branch. Your exhibit gets its own file in src/, is wired into dodo.py, and pulls data through FRED, the OFR API, or the chartbook catalog (the ftsfr pipelines). Details are in CODE_STYLE.md.

  3. Open a pull request and request review from two classmates. Your reviewers must verify that your code actually runs and builds your exhibit. Address their comments.

  4. Instructor review. After both classmate reviews are complete, I review and merge.

  5. Review two others. You must also serve as a reviewer on two classmates’ pull requests.

All of this must be complete by the deadline: Monday, August 10 at 11:59 pm CT.

Grading#

The Midterm Report is 10% of the course grade. Your contribution is graded out of 10 points.

Criterion

Points

Topic and importance. The exhibit addresses your claimed issue, speaks to the last 6 to 12 months, and cites a source that shows why it matters.

2

Message. The figure and paragraph carry one clear, coherent point.

2

Style. The chart matches the chart style guide and the code follows CODE_STYLE.md.

2

It works. The pipeline builds your exhibit end to end, and your reviewers verified this before I saw it.

2

Peer review. Two classmates reviewed your PR, and you completed reviews for two others.

2

Credit requires each step to happen before the deadline. A contribution that is still unmerged at the deadline, or that skipped peer review, cannot earn full credit no matter its quality.

Contents