I'm so glad I took this course! I was really apprehensive going into the semester after seeing all of the reviews stating that it is a hard class, which is true, but you learn about so many interesting topics.
As everyone has said, the exams are tough, but it's easy to go up in scores if you really dedicate yourself to it. I was able to go from scoring in the 80s to 90s once I focused on every detail from the textbook and lecture. The final was 40% of the course grade; however, there was an extremely generous curve that raised my course grade half a letter grade in the end!
Overall, Willingham is a nice and very knowledgeable professor. I met with him for office hours a few times throughout the semester and attended the exam review sessions, and you can tell how much he genuinely enjoys the course and teaching. At the start of the semester, he did an entire one on note-taking (since it is a notebook-only class), and I feel like that helped me learn to take better notes for my other classes, too. He highly stresses rewriting your notes after the lecture as well, which can be time-consuming, but a really good way to study, I learned.
A lot of the material overlaps between lectures and reading (sometimes basically word-for-word), which helped solidify a lot of the material.
All of that to say, cognition was my favorite class at UVA, and I would take it all over again if I could. I would really recommend this class to anyone who is at all interested in the material!

Going into this class as an intended psychology major, I knew from the reviews that it might be difficult, but it wasn't terrible. Cog is personally not an area of interest in psych of mine. Willingham is a great lecturer, and even with difficult concepts conceptually, he makes them easy to comprehend. I ended this class with a B-. However, many people I knew ended the class with higher grades, so getting a better grade is doable. The class is solely dependent on tests; there are three midterms(20% each) and one final (worth 40%). The tests are notoriously hard (Willingham says so himself on the syllabus), so he gives out pretty good curves to help with the class average. I got C's and B's with the curves and usually studied for about 10-12 hours a week when we had exams (not including note-taking and chapter reading, which are about 30 pages each). It's not a terrible class, but if you're looking for an easy A, this is not the class. I only took it as a required major course; I would not recommend it for a regular elective. If you're a science major (bio, chem, neuro, etc), I would recommend it as it covers some basic knowledge in those subjects, especially neuroscience. Overall, not easy but doable.

Prof. Willingham is a fantastic lecturer. He moves at a steady pace, routinely pauses for questions mid-lecture, and occasionally cracks a joke or two. He also often makes the class participate in little activities related to studies we're learning about, which I found to help keep me engaged.

I got an A+ in this class, and I think it is doable for anyone to do the same. Attend lectures unless you have a genuine reason not to (you have to ask him for the link to lecture recordings). Take notes that paraphrase what he says. Also, Prof. Willingham suggests reading textbook chapters after lecture rather than before. I had never done this for any other course, but I would recommend it here. He expects you to know everything in the textbook chapters unless he tells you otherwise, so it is useful to have the lecture content to prime you for the textbook reading.

Because there are no assignments in this course, time management is really essential to ensure you don't fall too far behind on the readings. The readings are less valuable if you can't dedicate a good amount of time to them, so do your best to finish them a few days post-lecture.

When studying for exams, I would do a kind of brain dump of course content chapter-by-chapter, filling in blanks in my memory with content from lecture slides/chapter readings. Then, I would take a past year's exam as a kind of "check" that my learning was secure. The course content changes a little bit year-to-year, so don't stress if something comes up on these exams you haven't encountered before. You can always ask Prof. Willingham to double check on the Canvas discussion boards.

There are 3 midterms in this class and a final exam. The midterms are 40 multiple choice questions that cover basically all of the content in lecture and the textbook, but the questions are more "do you know this or not" rather than application-based questions. The final is similar in difficulty and breadth, but it is 80 questions instead. Prof. Willingham curves all exams so the average is a B (about an 83), which often pushed my score above a hundred.

Disregard old reviews suggesting you can't figure out your grade before the end of the semester. This semester, Prof. Willingham removed the exam drop he's had in previous semesters and sent out emails that were quite explicit about which scores corresponded to which grades.

All in all, it is very doable to get an A in this course as long as you put in a bit of work and study efficiently. If the course material interests you, I would highly recommend this course. I found it fascinating. Prof. Willingham is a great lecturer, and I have found him very fair, reasonable, and kind. Plus I love his shiny bald head! Lol

I haven't taken the final yet, but I will update my review if that's necessary. Dr. Willingham is an exceptional and entertaining lecture; his lectures are engaging and necessary to attend if you want to pass the class, although he does not track attendance. With that said, there is absolutely zero grade padding in this class; your grade is entirely based on your performance on exams.

He does give generous curves on exams, so keep in mind that the published GPA average is AFTER these generous curves. Some, not all, exam questions are poorly written and seem like they are meant to trip you up. It is important to read the textbook, but the vast majority of what he tests you on are focused on what is covered in lecture. He expects you to remember the names of researchers, specific experiments, and which topics the experiments relate to.

This class is gonna be hard. You do have to memorize the entire textbook of very dense material. The tests can be confusing and challenge your knowledge of the topic and sometimes can be very weirdly worded and misleading, so it is important to test yourself on the topic with complicated questions beforehand. I think parts of it are unnecessarily hard, but I still learnt a lot.

I really liked this class. Professor Willingham is a great lecturer, and he wrote the textbook that he assigns which is very helpful. He doesn't record the lectures and I highly recommend going because he clarifies many of the things covered in the textbook and often talks about things that aren't in the book. He does post the slides after the lecture, but I don't think it's enough to just read them and not go to lecture. Your grade is solely based on your midterms and finals. There are three midterms and you get to drop one. I don't think the midterms were that hard, but he does grab some niche topics so make sure you study and cover everything in the book and from lectures. Reading the textbook took me a while, but I take meticulous notes so it may not be that way for everyone. He does curve all the tests so that the average grade is a B, which can be helpful if you're on the lower end of the spectrum and can even add a point or two if you're on the mid to higher end. The material itself is interesting and relatable to everyday life, which made it easier to understand. Overall not too hard, and Willingham is great.

This class is super interesting if you are interested in psychology or neuroscience, but it is not an easy A. You def have to read the textbook and study for exams. I also recommend going to lecture as much as possible because even though he uploads slides, they aren't nearly as informative as he is in lecture. His slides are vague, and he fills in the blanks in class. That said I def did skip once or twice and I still got an A. Willingham is funny, I think he is a good lecturer. The reading can be a pain, but overall it is pretty interesting stuff. I recommend this class but be ready to put a bit of work into it!

Willingham is a great professor. He is a super nice guy who genuinely cares about his students and wants to ensure you do well. He frequently stops in-class for questions, which is super refreshing. The professor is amazing. That being said, the course is not easy. The readings are not bad compared to other psychology classes. He usually has us read a chapter a week, which is nice, but that also means he has 2 days to go super in-depth into the concepts to make the course and the exams more detail-oriented. Your grade comprises 3 exams + the final, but you get to drop your test grade further from the class's mean on the test. However, you will not know what you have in the class until the last day of class. I enjoyed him but wish his class was not so detail-oriented.

#tCFF23

This was one of my first psychology classes at UVA and it was extremely difficult. For this class there are two 75 minute lectures and the only grades are four exams. You are expected to do the readings from the textbook, which Dr. Willingham wrote himself, before class, then he lectures about a few things that will be on the exams. He does not lecture about all the content so it is really important to take good notes from the textbook and study it intensively before the exams. Due to bad performance on exams, there was always a pretty large curve for each exam, but even with that I did not do well in the course. Attendance is optional for the lectures, but you will not pass the class if you do not attend the lectures, because he talks about specific things that will appear on any of the exams. #tCFS24

This class is a balance between super interesting and kinda hard. You need to go to every lecture (the panopto never worked) and memorize everything that comes out of DTW's mouth. I took audio recordings of every single lecture so that if I missed something I could go back later and listen to it again—I definitely recommend recording everything yourself if you can. The textbook was written by DTW himself and yes, you also have to memorize every single line. Your grade is determined by three 40-question multiple choice midterms and one 80-question multiple choice final. A lot of people complain about that but I took this class for my HSS elective as an E-school student so I definitely preferred the tests to writing papers and having discussions. I got an A in the class, so my biggest tips are going to every lecture, recording, taking notes while reading, taking notes during lecture, and rewriting those lecture notes after class. I also made a study group with my friends who were taking it with me, and we locked in every weekend before tests to draw mindmaps of content and quiz each other. The class is super interesting and DTW is a really interesting guy to listen to/talk to (go to office hours and talk to him!), and especially if you're in the E-school and looking for an HSS elective that doesn't require writing, I would def recommend.