Took this class and felt that it was extremely difficult! The exams are completely unpredictable, she doesn't give you any hints on what could be on the exam, you have no clue what to study for, and her office hours are never helpful. Class is taught very broadly but very specific details that aren't even mentioned in lecture and that I actually could not find in the book were tested on the exam. You go into the class thinking it's easy because lecture is very shallow so you think it's easy until you get to the exams and as soon as you look at it, you scream FML. She talks too fast at times as well and goes off topic on many slides which make it harder for you to connect the material which she is lecturing on to the material on the slide. Very hard class where I put a ton of hours of work and did not get the results that I feel I deserved because this class is very unfairly difficult.

Professor Wassum is clearly knowledgeable on the topic of learning. I just wish this class was easier to understand. For a professor who studies learning you would think she'd be an outstanding teacher. I got straight 100% on all 10 weekly summaries, which should supposedly show my understanding of the class, but her tests are just dreadful. I studied really hard and was able to make improvements, but if I knew this class would be the way it was, I wouldn't have taken it. I only recommend this class for people who really enjoy Pavlovian and Instrumental conditioning and have a good understanding of these topics and experiments. If you don't, then good luck, because this class is ROUGH.

Alright the reviews here are super dramatic lmao. The exam averages for winter 2022 were in the high B to low A range… people did well lol. Relax

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS! This has been the worst class I have ever taken and is extremely difficult even if you study. Lecture slides are not helpful, she talks extremely fast, and you will have to watch lectures over and over again just to make sure you got the information correct. The exams were pretty hard and are worded in a way that is confusing and overwhelming. The professor definitely knows her stuff but it seems like there is little care in making sure her students understand the material as well. Please, reader, save yourself from this anxiety and pain staking workload.

I was super worried going into this class because of the reviews, but it turned out to be one of the easiest classes I've taken. Weekly summaries take 10 minutes to write. And the clarity of Wassum's lectures are 9/10 I'd say. The tests were quite straightforward as well. Maybe it was easier for me because the tests were online exams? I highly recommend this class from my experience. Again the disclaimer being the online format.

I loved taking class from Professor Wassum. It's very inspiring to see a very knowledgable and successful woman in psych research too – you can tell she loves what she does. I think I saw a review about her being condescending when you ask questions but I never got that vibe from her when she answered my questions or anyone elses. She is very engaging and gives a lot of individual guidance for class assignments and the final essay. The workload is not bad at all and if you show up and pay attention the material is interesting and not too difficult to grasp.
Would definitely take from her again!

Professor Wassum does talk pretty fast and she uses jargon that isn't accessible to everyone. Some of her test questions are worded very strangely. Reviewing the past quiz questions is also important as she does reuse questions from the weekly quizzes for the tests. I would recommend putting all the quiz questions on a doc to easily search through them. To study, I would go through the lecture slides and for each topic I would try to make a quick summary based on my memory. I would then rewatch the lecture for any parts I couldn't remember and add it to my study guide. Our class also made a study guide which helped a lot with Ctrl + F.
I didn't always go to discussion but if you're having trouble wit the concepts/didn't pay as much attention in lecture it's worth going to. In my discussion we just reviewed lecture concepts with examples. We got to take things a lot slower. I did not read the textbook after week 1 as the lecture slides were sufficient. It wasn't the worse class for me but I am pretty good at understanding fast-lecturers. The concepts can be tricky but none of them go too into depth either so they aren't too hard to explain.
You don't need to understand what happens in every experiment imo, you just need to understand the implication of the results. Wassum presents a lot of experiments and glosses over the details of their set-up sometimes but she never asks you to recall the exact set up of one specific experiment.

this class is not a walk in the park but it's not as completely awful as some of the reviews make it out to be. there is a lot of content covered in the class, and prof wassum does talk pretty fast, but she bruincasts which makes it easier to review after class. the first exam was definitely the hardest and everyone did a lot better on the second exam, so I think we all learned how to study and prepare better. the third exam/final was honestly easy compared to the previous two. just make sure to take as detailed notes as you can the first time around and rewatch the lectures to fill in any gaps before each exam. it also helps to make a group study guide and list of all the correct quiz questions since sometimes she pulls from those directly. anyways, it's a core class, and it's not supposed to be super easy!! you'll survive though.

Dr. Wassum is clearly a seasoned professor with a lot of teaching experience. Her slides were well organized, with summary slides every so often, and her lectures were interesting and easy to follow. It is important to take your own notes though (as opposed to just copying down slides) as most of what she goes over are relevant studies and her slides just show the graphs. I wasn't super passionate about the material (101C is much different from the molecular/cellular stuff we did in 101A and 101B), but Dr. Wassum was still very interesting to listen to. Her test was straightforward and she explained ahead of time what to expect and gave us practice questions, so everyone did pretty well. I would consider taking another class with her.

This was the worst class I've ever taken at UCLA. Professor Wassum was not understanding about anything regarding extra help, curving exams, or even acting like a human when it came down to discussing grades. She was unhelpful and too focused on herself to care about her students. Don't take this class, take any other column A class, not 110.