PSYC 3200

If you don't have to take this class, do NOT take it. She is a nice person, but it is so hard to comprehend anything in lecture and her exams suck. A lot of them are choose all that apply which is frustrating or drop down boxes with numerous options. The textbook is not helpful either it is extremely dense and also makes no sense since there are so many typos. There are weekly quizzes that you can retake until you get a 100 but when you don't do great on exams thats not very helpful. Some people do well on them but like for this "fundamentals" neuroscience class there is no need for the content to be extremely difficult to comprehend. She is super helpful but I think it can be difficult to grasp the material because her lectures are all over the place and the slides are extremely confusing. In all, the class is not the hardest thing ever but it is a pain because you do need to do everything basically on your own and you will look around the class and see everyone is so confused.

Professor Erisir is incredibly kind and helpful if you just take the time to ask her questions one on one. It is difficult to understand her lecture at times, but going to office hours is INCREDIBLY helpful. There are 4 exams and weekly quizzes. She drops your lowest exam out of the first 3, and you can retake the quizzes as many times as you need before the deadline. Her quizzes are difficult, but they are all in her lecture slides and they are very similar to her exams. The material is very very dense and difficult to understand but the best way to pass this class is flashcards, office hours with TAs and asking her questions. I genuinely like Professor Erisir and think if you put your mind to it, you can pass this class with an A.

You will come out of this class having learned SO much. With that being said, it is honestly a pretty difficult class. Lectures are incredibly dense and I found the textbook hard to understand on the first try especially because it is so in depth for an introductory course. If you're worried about taking this class, one thing that really helps is attending the exam review sessions with the TAs. I feel like I would've been so lost without those sessions. The exams definitely are on the more difficult side, and you will probably spend over 20 hours preparing for exams because you'll need to rewatch the lectures, attend review sessions, and review readings/quizzes in order to do well on the tests. I spent about 30-40+ hours reviewing on exam weeks for tests, and always scored around 80% on each exam. This class definitely requires a lot of work, but somehow it isn't incredibly stressful because you know that she genuinely wants you to succeed and you have review sessions and resources to help you!

Do NOT take this class as a summer course if you can avoid it. Professor Erisir is kind and it's obvious that she is incredibly smart and knowledgable about her field. However, the way she teaches her class can be quite confusing, especially given that she condensed ALL of the content of a 15-week neuroscience course into 4 weeks. I poured my heart and soul into carefully reading the (very dense and confusing) textbook, rereading all the lecture slides after class, completing homework, studying for exams, making diagrams, and asking my classmates questions, and I still ended up falling very short on the exams.

Exams made up 80% of our grade and are VERY difficult -- multiple answer questions with answers that are designed to trip you up with extremely tiny details. There were also short-response questions that were very difficult and would always lose me points. These exams are closed note and closed book, and only the first one was curved.

If you are confident in your ability to memorize a TON of information, diagrams, graphs, and neurological processes, this might be the class for you! If not, please be warned. Go to office hours. NEVER skip class. DO NOT wait until the last minute to study for exams. Again, Professor Erisir is a great person and incredibly knowledgable about the field of neuroscience, but I didn't feel as though this "fundamentals" course really reflected a comfortable, beginner-friendly introduction to neuroscience.

This was a summer course so of course It was expected to be a touch harder than your average class. This one however was set up to be a student's worst nightmare.
The professor is personally very knowledgeable but really bad at expressing that information in lecture. she needlessly uses abbreviations and posts the slides exactly when class starts so you can't preread them to help your understanding.
You will quickly find out that the textbook for this course is simply not worth the money as the chapters go into content fairly far removed from the actual content of the class.
You may be wondering about that 10 hours of other that was the time i spent teaching myself the material that she didn't teach us effectively enough for us to grasp.
The slides and the learning objectives are buried in the files next to other stuff that she won't tell you is there like the lecture recordings (only helpful if you miss a class)
Don't get me started on the exams. the exams are worded extremely poorly leading to 'mistakes' that are really just wording errors. there was one question on the exam where two of the answer choices were just swapping the words giant and squid around and only one of these was right.
over all there's a good reason that this class has such a bad review score don't take it.
if you have to take it be prepared to take two hours out of the day to learn what you need to teach yourself