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Computer-assisted assessment (CAA) is widely used in modern university courses in many different fields. It can be used both in formative and summative assessments and with different emphasis on (self-)training, grading, and feedback generation. This article reports on experiences from using the CAA tool "JACK" to support a university lecture on mathematical statistics for exercises, tests, and exams. We show and discuss, among others, a positive relationship between usage intensity of JACK and final grades. Moreover, students generally report to invest more time into studying when offered a CAA, and to be satisfied with such a setup.

This study uses a Bayesian VAR (BVAR) to demonstrate that the recent boom in German house prices can be explained by falling interest rates and that higher interest rates are likely sufficient to stop the price increase. The latter suggests a potential drawback of the current monetary policy of the ECB. The BVAR's prior information shrinks the model parameters towards a parsimonious benchmark in order to avoid overfitting the data. We use an empirical Bayes approach to select the informativeness of the prior. To choose relevant control variables, we use a Bayesian variable selection approach. In addition to impulse responses and variance decompositions, we use a Bayesian conditional forecast to test the hypothetical effect of an interest rate increase on house prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]