NOW TAKE THE REST OF THE ADVICE. Spring break is here, and I recommended that the theory class take a bit of down-time after most of them had confronted three exams within a week in the face of a rather grueling first eight weeks, a busy recruiting season, and a January that won't go away.

Apparently some did.

Now for the rest of my advice.

1. Whenever possible, prepare answers to homework problems and exams as if you were writing for Econometrica.

2. Whenever the objective function is a closed form of two variables, use the constraint to solve for one of the two variables in terms of the other and the parameters, find the zero of one first derivative, and evaluate the sign of one second derivative.

Will I see as much acceptance of this advice as I did of "stand down?"