I sure did loathe Psych in my first year. I did well too. I just couldn't stand Dr. Kim.

Originally Posted by Jay

Do you mean Dr. Day?

He's a great lecturer.

No way, Dr Day is the man, He was the prof for my first lecture and i loved his enthusiasm. I cant remember who the individual was who substituted for Dr Joe kim all i remember was his voice was extremely passive and he wasn't very enthusiastic

the questions were quite more complex than the elm quizzes or even the practice quizzes

im jus not sure how i did... doubt i failed.. but idunno :(

i wish they gave us more time... :(

If we had an hour and a half, it would've been fine. The questions took forever to read because they were 3-5 sentence paragraphs, and a lot of them you have to read over twice just to get the full sense of it. Then you had to decide between the options, plus the ridiculous amount of 'none of the aboves'. There were some tricky questions, but it could have been a lot worse. All I know is, I'm soo not looking forward to the final...

Well, except questions that will be on Language. Majoring in linguistics tends to help with that. :]

Originally Posted by feonateresa

If we had an hour and a half, it would've been fine. The questions took forever to read because they were 3-5 sentence paragraphs, and a lot of them you have to read over twice just to get the full sense of it. Then you had to decide between the options, plus the ridiculous amount of 'none of the aboves'. There were some tricky questions, but it could have been a lot worse. All I know is, I'm soo not looking forward to the final...

Well, except questions that will be on Language. Majoring in linguistics tends to help with that. :]

Agreed! The questions were actually really long! It took about a minute to just read the question, meaning we only had 30 sec to eliminate the wrong answers, go through each one and choose the right answer. It wasn't exactly enough :(.

Also, I disagree, Dr. Kim is actually really interesting. I just feel that the lectures don't go into enough depth as in the midterm, or at least the type of examples that were asked of us in the midterm.

And for those who took thwe course last year, was the textbook helpful? I'm considering getting it (even though there's a month left of classes :(!) if it helps?
Thanks!

Textbook was not at all useful, not worth getting. I'm sure most of these concerns will be addressed for the final.

I think a lot of it was because last year people finished ridiculously early on the midterm, I think it took me about half an hour to do. (And the exam was about the same, lol).

They're still working on finding that perfect balance.

i actually dont own the textbook either.. my TA told us not to bother

I thought it was a pretty fair midterm. There was adequate time to read all 35 quetions, and their possible answers. A bit on the challenging side, however.

You were given about 100 seconds or a minute 40 per question.

That's way more than enough time - the multiple choice should take you about a minute per question, which means you have 25 minutes leftover to check it over/leave early/focus on the ones you weren't sure about.

The level of difficulty of the questions, however, was strangely high. I don't think it was because the midterm itself was hard, but because we weren't given sufficient difficult practice. I could easily do all the ELM quizzes, the intropsych practice questions and whatnot, but then the midterm questions were nothing like those. If they gave out real practice for what would be on the midterm, the people who actually make time for Psych could have done better.

So I think the stuff done pre-test made the test harder than it actually was.

The wording and how the questions were constructed needed more than 1.7 minutes to answer. By the time i got to read and understand what each question was talking about and began to examin the four multiple choice options i was already running out of time. To me this test needed to be at least 80 minutes long or needed questions that were not exactly a freakin short story. DR KIM all i can say is CHILL MAN!!

Well you have to keep in mind that, most people had to deal with midterms/assignments before this one. I myself had three midterms last friday, a midterm on wednesday, plus tons of assignments and quizzes. It's difficult to study under that kind of stress, plus added stress of things like way-too-easy practice questions and IntroPsych/ELM missing in action.

The final should be easier, since we're not dealing with having to go to class, do assignments, and we'll have more time to study. The material is easy to understand, since Dr. Kim uses approachable examples and goes over concepts in the lectures enough to get it. However, I think most of us are used to having mostly recall questions, and maybe a few application questions. General experience in exams has us all unprepared in that respect.

But like I said, could have been waaaay worse.

None of them "needed" 1.7 minutes - some levels of schooling require you to read paragraphs about a quarter of a page long in 30 seconds, and form a diagnosis / find the right option in another 30 seconds; once again pace would be 1 minute/1 question.

Originally Posted by Alchemist11

None of them "needed" 1.7 minutes - some levels of schooling require you to read paragraphs about a quarter of a page long in 30 seconds, and form a diagnosis / find the right option in another 30 seconds; once again pace would be 1 minute/1 question.

Its a first year intropsych course, not a fourth year Physiology course.

Yeah, learn to skim the question, and pick out the important points i.e. the stuff in BOLD. The bolded terms were essentially 'hints' to answering the question, which I found were very helpful.