INTRODUCTORY COURSES ARE TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO BEGINNERS. That has long been the Cold Spring Shops position. Perhaps, with Professor Mankiw finding an academic study reaching that conclusion, deans and provosts will begin to listen.

Academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous value‐added but positively correlated with follow on course value‐added. Hence, students of less experienced instructors who do not possess a doctorate perform significantly better in the contemporaneous course but perform worse in the follow‐on related curriculum.

The primary purpose of the article is to evaluate the effectiveness of course evaluations, another distraction from the higher learning that deans and provosts might do well to dispense with.

(The sentence beginning with "hence" is a translation of the statistical inference stated in the preceding sentence.)