PSYC 1010

I really enjoyed this course. I liked Smyth's lectures a lot. He kept them entertaining and it was clear he was having a good time which I always like. The readings are very important especially because there are clicker questions every class. The questions are designed so that they are easy to answer correctly if you have done the reading but are usually a shot in the dark if you have not. There is never any written homework; the most we were ever asked to do was watch a video at home followed by clicker questions about it in class. I found the exams straight forward. If you attend class and do the readings the multiple choice questions are not hard, but the fill in the blank and short answer are a little more challenging. I ended up with an A in the class even though I got really behind on the readings for the last unit. I did make sure to catch up before the exam though because they are absolutely necessary for exams.

Professor Smyth's section of this course is hands down unneccesarily difficult. His lectures are somewhat interesting but his exams do not correlate with the readings and even the lectures half of the time. Do not take this course unless you are passionate about Psychology and want a rigorous professor. If you are just taking this to get your credit, look elsewhere. Professor Smyth is also not very helpful in office hours.

Everyone told me to take this class with Dodson, but I didn't listen. Smyth thinks he's the bee's knees, and I found him to have the same type of personality as someone who would scoff at something you did because he did it in a more high and mighty way, or try to shame you for eating meat because they were a vegan. Also, he tries way too hard to be "hip" and "cool", which comes off as cringy. The in-class material is not entirely dry, nor is the textbook reading, but there is a huge amount of reading to do for the class, which you absolutely need to do. On the tests, Smyth will ask you to recall nearly word-for-word long lists or examples that are not pertinent to the class material and are only mentioned in one sentence in one paragraph in one of the asides in the book. He WILL have information on the tests that is not covered in class. The tests have a lengthy short answer section, which is graded harshly, and includes arbitrary questions. Smyth is the type of guy to test you not on your understanding of the material, but on your ability to recall random useless facts that are not emphasized in class. I would recommend taking this class with a different professor. I managed to squeak out an A in this class, but not without significant deliberation. This class is not the easy A that your high school AP Psych class was.

Please DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS! AGAIN PLEASE DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS! This class was so uninteresting, boring, and dull and Smyth does not help either. You would think psychology would be fun and engaging, instead its word for word from a 400+ textbook. At least if the class was much more engaging you would've felt more inclined to do the reading. The reading is dreadful and so is the class. PLEASE DO NOT TAKE THIS BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE IT'LL BE FUN IT WON'T.

I find psychology super interesting as a field; unfortunately, I didn't realize that Intro Psych is a crash course of every single type of psychology there is (and if you take it with Fred Smyth, you'll be responsible for minutia). The minutia in this course is kind of ridiculous. Smyth's test are just minutia taken directly from the textbook, which makes it easy and yet hard at the same time. For his final, I just memorized the textbook because I'm not the sort of student who is really able to understand this stuff. You learn so much, and that's why it is such an awesome class. But taking it with Smyth made it feel like it was a weed-out class because of the level of detail he expected you to know.