Detailed Instructions about the Course Paper and its Grading:
Your paper should emphasize quality rather than quantity, and its structure should contain four sections: Introduction and objective, Review of Literature, Economic Analysis and Summary and Conclusion. The paper should be at least 10 pages in length without the Title Page.
Select any one of these three topics for your course paper. Empirical papers with data analysis will receive maximum credit.
- Government Regulation and Commercial Banking
- The Impact of Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 on Commercial Banking
- Smart Phones: A Comparative Analysis of Apple and Samsung
a). The introduction should be 1-2 paragraphs long. Specify the objective as clearly as possible. It should set the relevance of the topic and finish with the main question or questions you want to answer in this paper.The introduction must also state your main argument, idea or hypothesis of your paper.
b). Review of Literature. In this section, review several studies similar to what you are writing on. Make sure to give proper credit to each author(s) whose work you are quoting. Use the APA guidelines in referencing each article, book, journal or the Internet source. In the final paragraph or paragraphs of this section, explain how your paper will contribute to the body of knowledge. This section should be 3-4 pages long.
c). The Economic Analysis section should be 2-4 pages long. In this section you should present the empirical evidence and with the help of some microeconomic tools, you should explain rationally what happens in reality. Include terms like demand, supply, variable and fixed costs, marginal or incremental changes, marginal and average costs, price elasticity, income elasticity, maximization, minimization, normal profit, competitive markets, product differentiation, market structure, oligopoly, and other relevant terms.
- d) The summary and conclusion should be directly related to the objective of your paper. This section should be about one page long and it should answer the questions introduced in the objective of the paper. Be sure there is a strong connection between the introduction and the conclusion. You can also expand on the implications of your answer and predict something about the future.
The Final page or pages of your paper must contain the “Reference” section. The references must be drawn from the body of the paper. Use the APA style in listing the References. Your References should include at least one scholarly article relevant to your paper, a relevant book (not a textbook) and several Internet references.
Short papers are nice pieces of art. Your paper will be evaluated on the clarity of objective, rational coherence, quality of argument and format, more specifically on the contribution to the body of knowledge on the main subject. See grid handout for the grading criteria of your paper project.
* If plagiarism is detected, your course paper grade is automatically 0. However, it may escalate to a more severe penalty. Refer to National University catalog for policy description on plagiarism.
- Use Times New Roman font size 11 or 12 and double space your paper.
- Information on APA style is available at our Library, http://nuls.nu.edu/web/trainingtools/assets/media/APA.pdf or http://library.nu.edu/FindResources/ReferenceTools/citations.html.
- Refereed papers are academic papers that were critiqued and reviewed by experts before being published. More information can be found in http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/academic/sources/journals/index.html
http://www.yukoncollege.yk.ca/~agraham/guides/guidec.shtml. Internet articles and newspaper articles are NOT usually academic articles that fill the bill as a valid reference.
- To find the academic articles that you need for your paper (at least one), go to the following full text databases in our library: Business Source Premier (EBSCO), Emerald Management Xtra, LexisNexis Academic, ProQuest Databases and ProQuest Dissertations and Thesis. These databases are in http://library.nu.edu/FindResources/ResourceFinder.cfm. Databases have different sources or information, and you always have to combine them. Economists would say that databases are complements rather than substitutes, in other words, try more than one database.
7.Submit your essay under “Course Paper” link in Week Three on or before the due date. Use Microsoft Word software when you attach a file. Word files in .doc format work best as attachment for your course paper.
- After your instructor reads and scores your paper, the comments and the score will be available to you in your Inbox. You can read those Instructor Feedback comments in your Inbox or Gradebook with your paper. Be sure to click on the “+” box to fully open the comments box.
- Note: NU Library staff may help you writing this term paper. The email contact is writing@nu.edu, or you can ask for the closest Writing Center to you by calling 1-866-NU-ACCESS.