I feel like I know a lot more about Pavlovian and Instrumental Conditioning after this class, but this course doesn’t explore any other concepts in depth. The class should really be called: Pavlovian and Instrumental Conditioning. If you value the breadth of concepts and information presented in a course, this may not be the best class to take. Professor Wassum clearly knows the subject matter very well, but the exams do seem to be very detail-oriented and require that you really take a moment to digest the material and apply it carefully. Overall, it’s not an easy A, but students definitely can get an A when questions on the tests are thoughtfully worded (this wasn’t the case with the first exam) and students put in the necessary work.

class was ok!

only homework is the weekly assignments, which are actually really helpful for understanding and applying the things we learn in lecture. i wouldn't worry too much about reading the textbook since exams are lecture-based but it probably would be useful. no quizzes or projects. lecture is both in person and live/recorded on zoom.

midterm 1 was definitely a wreck for me because of the way the exam itself was structured and how questions were presented (online, not allowed to go back on questions, distracting names). but since a lot of people complained, she changed the difficulty to make questions more conceptual and less based on experiments, which was really helpful. i think the hardest part of this class is understanding each question and differentiating between each answer choice, since a lot of them are similar but have distinct differences that make them right/wrong. i definitely struggled, but she gives practice exams with questions that are repeated in the actual exams plus a bonus extra credit where you explain a topic of your choice.

tldr; not the easiest class, but doable with studying!