PSYC 3240

The class itself is fine, topics overlap a lot with cog neuro and several other classes in the psych department. you learn about animal cognition and how animals think, which is pretty applicable to humans (duh, we are animals too, just top of the pyramid) in most of the behaviors discussed. The grade distribution is pretty fair, 25% canvas reading quizzes (can be taken until 100%), 25% homework assignments (moderately difficult, but you can work in groups), 30% two midterms, and 15% one open note final exam. Lectures are kind of slow and boring, are not recorded, but slides are posted a week before the exam (but I don't get why he doesn't just do it right after the lecture)

HOWEVER, I ended the class with a 89.56; I got 100% on basically all the reading quizzes and homeworks, 71 on midterm 1, 82 on midterm 2, and a 85 on the final exam. I sent Dan an email, asking to be rounding up, which I believed I deserved because of my upward trend, consistent class attendance, and high performance on the quizzes and homeworks, and he responded telling me:
"I'm sorry, I round up sometimes but not when students ask to receive a grade other what they earned. It is unprofessional and not something I can justify reinforcing."
I think this is absurd, and for this reason left a poor course evaluation as well, and completely lost any remaining respect I had for him. If you like animals, sure, take the class. If you want to have a professor who respects you, your effort, and your time, avoid this class at all costs.

Idk why this class gets a bad rep. Personally I thought the concepts we went over were some of the most interesting parts of psychology. The only difficult part of this course is the homework assignments are a bit lengthy and hard to do if you don't understand the material, so it helps a lot to just go to office hours with the TA. I studied really hard for the midterms but I didn't need to because they were way easier than any of the homework. The weekly reading quizzes have unlimited attempts too. The only annoying thing was that the lectures aren't posted until the week of the exam, but other than that this was a really interesting course and definitely not as hard as people make it out to be. I highly recommend.

1. This class used to be a 2000 level class so DEFINITELY look at the reviews there before taking this class 2. This class was pretty do-able because of COVID. Everything was open note and the homework assignments were doable even though they sometimes took a while. The research proposal was also not too bad. But, this class is kind of boring. It's a lot more learning about concepts/experiments/models than I expected so it was not my favorite class, and I think if everything was closed book I would have hated it.