[shelbs]

I took this course during Fall of 2013 with Dr. Day. Just like all of Dr. Day's courses, there are 2 midterms worth 30% each (non-cumulative), and a final exam worth 40% (cumulative).

It was very difficult to get into this course. It used to be offered every other year, but due to demand, the school has started to offer it every year. With that said, there was still a waiting list and I didn't get a spot until August.

The course was pretty interesting but definitely not AS exciting as I was anticipating. We discussed the history of forensics and forensic psychology, interview and interrogation procedures, strategies for detecting deception, eyewitness testimony, jury psychology, profiling, assessments of fitness to stand trial, criminal responsibility, and violence risk, and ended the course discussing psychopathy. The content was pretty interesting but there were a lot of studies and statistics to remember for each of these sections, making it a little more difficult.

There was an online quiz bank which was extremely helpful (especially for determining which statistics are most important to remember, what kinds of questions to expect, etc.). I wouldn't suggest memorizing the quiz bank questions because although some of the questions appear directly as they are in the bank, Dr.Day does alter a lot of them.

As with all of Dr.Day's courses, the tests also contained 10-12 textbook specific questions. These were non-cumulative, so different chapters were tested on each test. The textbook was not the most enjoyable read - it was a little on the boring side - and the readings were pretty long. I found that these questions were a little random and even when I read the text, I found myself guessing for several of them.

Overall it was an enjoyable and very fair course. Dr.Day is a great professor - he is an amazing lecturer and he provides countless resources so you can do well (audio recordings of lectures, audio and visual recordings, he also posts copies of the midterms, your mark and your Scantron selections so you can compare and see where you went wrong - usually very quickly too, within a day or 2 of writing the test). I would definitely recommend this course to anyone who is interested in the subject matter, especially if they have taken Dr.Day courses before and enjoy his teaching/testing style.

I took this course in Winter 2016. This was the first year that they offered this course for two semesters, both taught by Dr. Day (it used to be every other year, and the waiting list was huge). Like other Dr. Day courses, this one is not that different (other than the content you cover).

To be honest, I didn't really enjoy the course as much as I thought I would have. There are some very interesting aspects of the course (Eyewitness Testimony, Jury Psychology), but a lot of the course was very mundane. There are a lot of stats to remember.

The most helpful thing about this course was the quizbank. Like all Dr. Day courses, it is best to do the quizbank AFTER you do all your studying, because the quizbank does not have every single question you need to know. You should go through the quiz bank as many times as you can until you've been exposed to as many questions as possible, and note that sometimes he has variations of the same question in his quizbank, so make sure you can differentiate between them. If you understand the answer for every single quiz bank question, the midterm and exam should not be that much more difficult (he usually has half of the questions repeats from quiz bank, and the remaining may be new variations (but very similar to the quizbank) you've never seen before or even brand new questions). The averages for the midterms were low to mid 70s.

The readings are dull, and the worst part of all his courses. The good thing is that each test only has ~3 chapters of readings, which is way less than Personality (which had about 4-5 chapters per midterm or exam). You need to know them well if you want to do well in his courses, because about 20-25% of the midterm is based on the textbook readings. It usually is not enough to simply read the readings, you need to take notes and then learn those notes well, because he will get into the nitty-gritty details.

Overall, I'd recommend this course if you enjoyed Dr. Day's 2nd year classes, they will be very similar in style!