Professor
Carolyn Murray
1 of 1
AD
Most Helpful Review
Summer 2024 - If youre taking over the summer, she monitors attendance through zoom polls which is annoying because she will only have 2 for the entire 2 hour lecture but you do not know when she will ask them so you just gotta be on your feet the whole time. Class is really easy but I hard sold on the final quiz and dropped my grade to a A-, otherwise should have ended with a comfortable A. Quizzes are open notes and open book, 15 questions, 13 MC and 1-2 Short Answer. You can get an easy A if you put even a little effort but don't completely doze off like I did. D:
Summer 2024 - If youre taking over the summer, she monitors attendance through zoom polls which is annoying because she will only have 2 for the entire 2 hour lecture but you do not know when she will ask them so you just gotta be on your feet the whole time. Class is really easy but I hard sold on the final quiz and dropped my grade to a A-, otherwise should have ended with a comfortable A. Quizzes are open notes and open book, 15 questions, 13 MC and 1-2 Short Answer. You can get an easy A if you put even a little effort but don't completely doze off like I did. D:
AD
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2024 - All things considered, I enjoyed this class. I can definitely see why it left some students frustrated though. In my opinion, Dr. Murray is a good lecturer and a nice/approachable person; with that being said, her exams were quite challenging. They were open note, but some of the questions were pretty jargony and/or required a decent chunk of extra intuition/thinking, which resulted in an okay average for the midterm and a low (especially for the Psych department) average on the final. You definitely need to study. We learned all the intricacies of vision and a decent amount on auditory perception, which I found pretty interesting. We had two projects/papers as well in which we read scientific articles related to either somatosensation or audition and made comparisons to lecture content on vision. I feel like this was a great way to get some extra practice for scientific writing, but many students found the projects quite boring. If you are a science-oriented person who likes to understand the fine-grained details of perceptual processes, this class probably won't be too bad. However, if you're somebody who only really enjoys the social sciencey part of psych, you're in for a wild ride. Overall, you definitely have to work for your grade. I took Psych 115, and I would consider this more difficult. Even some neuroscience/premed people were struggling with the exams, which I feel speaks to the depth with which you need to understand the material. Dr. Murray was kind enough to change our grading scheme to unweighted, so people did not do too bad overall grade-wise. If you want to learn a lot (even though the content might not seem to have much real-world applicability) and are confident in your test-taking abilities, I don't think this class is nearly as bad as other students portray it to be. However, there are definitely easier classes to take.
Winter 2024 - All things considered, I enjoyed this class. I can definitely see why it left some students frustrated though. In my opinion, Dr. Murray is a good lecturer and a nice/approachable person; with that being said, her exams were quite challenging. They were open note, but some of the questions were pretty jargony and/or required a decent chunk of extra intuition/thinking, which resulted in an okay average for the midterm and a low (especially for the Psych department) average on the final. You definitely need to study. We learned all the intricacies of vision and a decent amount on auditory perception, which I found pretty interesting. We had two projects/papers as well in which we read scientific articles related to either somatosensation or audition and made comparisons to lecture content on vision. I feel like this was a great way to get some extra practice for scientific writing, but many students found the projects quite boring. If you are a science-oriented person who likes to understand the fine-grained details of perceptual processes, this class probably won't be too bad. However, if you're somebody who only really enjoys the social sciencey part of psych, you're in for a wild ride. Overall, you definitely have to work for your grade. I took Psych 115, and I would consider this more difficult. Even some neuroscience/premed people were struggling with the exams, which I feel speaks to the depth with which you need to understand the material. Dr. Murray was kind enough to change our grading scheme to unweighted, so people did not do too bad overall grade-wise. If you want to learn a lot (even though the content might not seem to have much real-world applicability) and are confident in your test-taking abilities, I don't think this class is nearly as bad as other students portray it to be. However, there are definitely easier classes to take.
1 of 1
