The Board of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) holds meetings on the first Tuesday of each month (except January) to discuss the state of the Australian economy and to decide the appropriate monetary policy action in terms of changing or maintaining the official interest rate (i.e. the cash rate). After each meeting, the RBA will first make a brief statement (Monetary Policy Media Release) stating the Board's decision on the official cash rate. A much more detailed statement (Statement on Monetary Policy) will be released later. The Statement on Monetary Policy provides a lot of information about how the Board reached its decision, including supporting statistics. Students are required to forecast the official cash rate decision of the Board for a particular month. Students are also required to explain their forecast in a statement somewhere in between the Monetary Policy Media Release and the Statement on Monetary Policy (i.e. more detailed than the former but much more concise than the latter). The assignment is due a few days before the Board meeting. In their two-page statement, students are expected to provide both evidence (e.g. statistical figures) and judgment (e.g. what those figures mean for the Australian economy). The 'real' statement released by the RBA can serve as an informal benchmark for marking. Students are allowed to do the assignment individually or as a group of two. If two students do this assignment as a group, they are not allowed to do another assignment of the course as a group.
Advantages
The assignment design can remain exactly the same from one year to another because the answer itself will change with the macroeconomic environment.
It requires students to go beyond textbook materials and think (and write) like a professional economist.
Challenges
A lot of relevant analyses made by market economists are available on the Internet and therefore students have less incentives to do their own
analysis
.
For periods where the direction of future policy change (or the lack of it) is very clear, the forecasting part of the assignment becomes too easy.
Tips for implementation
Asking students to submit a draft could help identify unintentional plagiarisms and thereby reduce the chance of their occurrence in the final submission.
How it supports academic integrity
All submissions are checked by Turnitin. For educational purposes, students are allowed to see the originality
report
and revise their submission if needed. Also, students are required to submit a draft prior to the final submission, which should push them to prepare the assignment earlier rather than till the last minute. Students who plagiarised in the past often cited poor time management and the pressure to meet the deadline as key drivers of their wrong academic decision.
PLEASE NOTE: The academic integrity information displayed on this page is currently under review. Some examples and descriptions were developed before the widespread availability of generative AI tools and may not reflect current approaches to assessment security. When adapting an assessment idea, staff should consider how the design supports authorship, verifies student achievement of learning outcomes, and mitigates inappropriate use of AI and other forms of academic misconduct.
