He is so smart and expects everyone to be at his level and that makes his lectures hard to understand. This professor was the most understanding Neuroscience professor ever. His exam was fair, and his quizzes were clear. The biggest reason for this review is to emphasize that he was the only understanding Neuro professor during this pandemic. God bless his kind soul. Read the book, take good notes and you'll be fine for his module.

This is a joint review for 101A, for which I had White, Chandler, and Piri.

The class is structured such to have 3 exams worth 25% each (non-cumulative) & quizzes/discussion attendance worth the remaining 25%. Simple stuff really.

Now, as for whether I liked the class....I don't know. Seriously. Some days, learning about neurological electrophysiology and how the senses work would be extremely fascinating, and other days, mostly learning about reflexes, would make the 2-hour class feel like it was going on for half a day. To be said, I was a neuroscience major coming in and then bumped that down to a neuroscience minor coming out - make of that what you will.

The thing is, the entire neuroscience 101 series is exceptionally pedantic. On exams, one needs to use the proper verbiage each time, be thorough, answer the question and supply a bit more to make sure that you've got it right, and then you might...might get full credit on an essay question.

Piri's module would be considered by most the "easier" of the three, however, I had the hardest time during his exam. Though they were 40 multiple choice it was slightly tricky wording and I don't think his lectures did a good job at covering the material that would be covered on the exam. I would highly recommend reading the textbook and taking notes from there rather than relying fully on lecture. There were details on the exam that were barely mentioned in lecture so when it came up it was confusing. It is incredibly evident that Piri is very intelligent, however, he was not the best lecturer when conveying some of his points. Though his material was fairly interesting and pretty straight forward I would say this was my least favorite module because of the way the lectures went. The mean was a 77 and the median was a 82.5 so it was slightly lower than both of the previous modules.

He has very dense/detailed lectures about the sensory systems that can be a drag to get through sometimes even though I did find it very interesting. On the bright side, if you take really good notes and just skim along in the textbook, his 40 MC test is quite straightforward. I wouldn't say easy bc the mean was a 78 and media was 82.5, but reading the questions AND answer choices carefully (some times he can be tricky) is a must to succeed.

Otherwise he's extremely nice and helpful and has a much better testing experience than Chandler and White.

Piri is a sweet, little angel. He's basically god's apology for the rest of this class. Even as we were taking our test he wanted to give us extra time and made jokes, and I love him.
His module has the most material but is very easy to understand. It's basically a stream of arbitrary facts and he follows the book extremely closely. He's hard to understand and throws in lots of technical words that none of us know. However, the man is so understanding and helpful via email and office hours.
He made his module exam 40 MC in about 70 minutes for us when he heard we didn't feel up to free-response. He held a review where he went slide-by-slide and answered everyone's questions. I ended up getting a 100/100 on his exam purely by taking really good book notes. For comparison, I got an A on Chandler's, and a B with the 10 point adjustment on White's.
Overall I think the modules went like this for me
Interesting material: Chandler> Piri> White
Easiest material: Piri> White> Chandler
Nicest prof: Piri> Chandler=White
Tests: Piri> Chandler> White
Prepares you for the test: Chandler> Piri> White
Overall module: Piri>Chandler> White

Slides are absolutely horrible. And these are combined with the lectures that are incredibly difficult to understand for many reasons.

This guy was awful. He talked in a low monotone throughout the entire lecture, and I realized going to class was not time well spent. He provides you with a reader, and also relies heavily on the book, so I would personally recommend using your class time for THAT instead of wasting 2 hours trying not to doze off.

Ok, this class was a rollercoaster ride. Hardest material (Chandler), medium material (White), easy but a lot of material to understand (Piri). Chandler's midterm was conceptual and having only about 1hr for 10 free-response questions was pretty stressful to do. However, the grading was lenient for this exam. Avg was about 80% and that's what I got. now the second module which was fun to learn was White, the midterm was so much better and easier than chandlers.... or so we thought! We were told to keep it simple and answer the question straight forward. This is what the class did, but when we got our scores back it was a complete disaster. The rubric was totally against what we are asked to provide on the exam and that totally screwed us over. Avg was about 68% and we got 10 pts back to bring it to 78%avg. Got a 75% after that. At this point, I knew I wasn't gonna get an A so I switched to P/NP. Piri is a great guy, but it's hard to listen to his lectures, his voice is very monotone, but he did give us a 40 MC choice exam which was the easiest out of the three modules. Advice: watch the lectures, read the book, and go to office hours! Good luck FALL 2021 !

He teaches the 3rd module of 101A. He gives a lot of material but his exams is quite straight forward if you know everything. His lectures are a bit boring though and hard to keep listening for two hours. He follows the book quite well however. So that's good.

Personally, most of what I learned in this module was what I taught myself from the book. The Purves book--and any other neuro textbooks you have--are gonna be your saving graces. His lectures were really unorganized, constantly jumping around, slides out of order, and a lot of what he mentioned seemed to have no relation to anything else. It was also a near impossibility to take notes on his lectures, because his slides were all pictures and diagrams and he would just put it up and talk through it. Which may have been more helpful if the diagrams weren't unnecessarily complicated/advanced. It would also be difficult to understand him sometimes, as he would kind of go off on a side note, end up somewhere else, go back three slides, somehow tie that in to the first slide, and suddenly the lecture is over and we didn't get through the whole powerpoint. I think most people just started watching them recorded, but personally I felt that this made them even more difficult to understand. Nothing against Piri, he seems like a nice guy and you can tell he really cares about the students, it's just that this module could probably be more organized. He also held a review session for us before the exam that went for like 4 or 5 hours, so no one can ever say he isn't dedicated. Probably my least favorite of the three modules, but I'm pretty sure there are people in the class who would be willing to fight me over whether Chandler's was the hardest. Not that bad, just again, probably not a course to take unless you're a major taking the course series. I think there are better elective options if you're a nonmajor.