Class took: Psych 118

Professor doesn't really teach, so much as read off his slides (which contained mostly snapshots of the book). He would often go on tangent about gossip between people in his field, or something personal about his life. Once he went on to describe the plot of Lady and the Tramp to our class. He is knowledgeable, but I got the sense that he's been in the field so long that all this stuff is obvious to him (Darwin's theories aren't exactly right), but he forgot that we're students and are having a hard time navigating years and years of conflicting theories and research. Not really sure what I'm supposed to learn.

Minor has been one of my favorite professors at UCLA, and one of my favorite teachers of all time. He is extremely intelligent and is one of the best in his field -- prepare for him to treat you as someone who is the same. If you've been admitted to UCLA in the impacted Psych major, he expects you to work hard and be someone who can one day work at his level. He's more about the biological and neuroscience side of psychology instead of the social side, which is what I'm interested in. I want to go into the research field that he's in, so his class was interesting to me. If you're more interested in counseling you may find it a little more difficult to get into the material the way he teaches it. I find him to be a really funny and genuine person. He's answered questions about my psych path and I really appreciate that. He is a no fluff, no BS kind of guy so if you don't like that, it may not be a good match and you may need to take the course with someone else.

Let me start this by saying THIS GUY SUCKS! I took him for 118 and although I found the course and the book VERY interesting, I can't overstate how little concern this guy has for students. He forces you to go to lecture by instituting these stupid questions at the beginning of each lecture which he decided to count as our "3rd midterm" and of course many students performed much worse on these than on the REAL midterm and final thus screwing their grade. He is one of those teachers who feels he is intellectually leaps and bounds above his students and it shows in any attempted interaction with him. Avoid this guy if you can, you'll save yourself a whole lot of frustration!

His class was easy. He lectures straight from the book, and just goes over the experiments. He's kind of funny sometimes, doesn't spell very well, but it's okay. Go to class, so you know what's important. I went to class, did a sudoku daily, and half-paid attention. Then, I went home, read the parts of the book that were relevant to the slides and took notes onto the slides. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING is to go to the TA's review session right before the tests, because they basically tell you what the questions will be. I got an A on both tests (two midterms, 50% each, not cumulative). Seriously, I'm not really sure how people could do badly in this class. It's pretty straightforward.

Lectures with Minor were enjoyable. The material is already interesting and he makes jokes which make coming to lecture easy. His exams are pretty fair. Just memorize his lectures and read most of the reading, especially the pictures and you'll be fine. Its true that he isn't generally available but overall the class was straight forward, didn't require too much work, and interesting.

Proffesor Minor made a pointless class even more painful than i could have imagined. Psych 118 feels like a waste of time, but on top of that the final, out of nowhere, was about 50% fill-in the blank. The only saving grace was that i completed the extra credidt assignment - going ot the zoo.