Bardonomics

Image: TrinityPrep and Fox It's exam season, so here's some light, bite-sized economics. By now you have probably laboured your way through piles of frustrating mocks for an alphabet soup of tests. Yet every time you get a less-than-ideal score on one of those Barron's practice tests, you hold onto a sliver of hope: the practice test is generally more difficult than the actual exam. This is no coincidence—test prep companies like Barron's likely have economic incentives to design their practice tests questions in a manner such that they are more difficult than what one is likely to face in an actual testing situation. But what are these incentives? Strange as it seems, an experiment with weather forecasts in Kansas City could shed some light. In April 2007, Kansas City resident J.D. Eggelston's fifth-grade daughter was assigned a school project to keep track of the accuracy of weather forecasts for a week. Intrigued, Eggelston decided to continue his da