Taken Winter 2016 with Humphreys
Evaluation:
- non-cumulative midterms worth 18% but the lowest one is dropped!
experiment participation 2%
2 papers on two experiments (first worth 5%, second worth 10%)
29% final exam
PROS:
-- Course content was very similar to Psych 1XX3! And very interesting (memory, language, attention, problem solving, etc).
--I didn't find tests too hard. They were 37 multiple choice each and I scored 80+ on all of them by studying well (see tips below)
--course outline is very fair and forgiving
CONS:
-- While Dr.Humphrey's in a nice lady, her lectures were pretty much a waste.
You MUST read the textbook to do well in the course. She does not go in depth in her lectures, but will add a few studies in lecture that are not in the text and I guarantee you this material will show up on tests!
--Basically her lectures are her showing examples of illusions and stuff which is fun but only for so long... ALSO this is a 3 hour night class. She would suddenly dismiss us after 1 hour at the beginning of the term then kept us longer towards the end which made no sense.
--She would upload test marks and then two days later say "whoops I made an error entering the grades, so your grades can go up or down now" --> THIS HAPPENED FOR EVERY TEST
--the TAs did not give good feedback for the written papers and the second one worth the higher percentage was not even graded until after the exam......
--each textbook chapter takes about 3 hours to read (while taking notes)
Overall, you should really be into the content if you take this course. I came out with more appreciation of the material and feel like it is definitely good intro for the third year Psych courses! I came out with a 10 because I studied the textbook then I looked over her notes and supplemented whatever was not in the text into my notes.
My strategy to do well was basically know an example for each theory you learn, and compare that example to ones given on the test. You can do well in this course. Many people didn't because they probably expected the material from lecture to be enough. Tests are very little recall, mostly application given examples and situations.