PSYC 2400

I took this class with Professor McFarland, and would NOT recommend it. I'm fairly certain that this is her first year teaching at a university, and it definitely shows. She literally copies straight from the textbook onto powerpoint slides, and then reads them in class. Lectures are such a big waste of my time. She's incredibly vague in lecture as well. One redeeming factor of this course is that she gives four tests over the semester (three non-cumulative, chapter-specific tests, and one cumulative final) and takes the average of your top three grades to be your final grade. I have my second test tomorrow, and I'm not really sure what to study, so I'm procrastinating by writing this review. She teaches in a way that makes the course more of a self-teaching course. As in, she doesn't teach very much. This class has honestly made me dislike psychology. :(

God this class sucks so much. McFarland means well but her lectures are her literally reading slides copied from the book. Half the class skips because she's such a bad lecturer. The TA wasn't much better at explaining concepts and overall most of the course is teaching yourself about personality. 1/10 would not recommend.

Professor McFarland is nice, easy to talk to, and has a background in clinical psychology, so she often tells us interesting stories from her work that are relevant to class. However, I would NOT recommend this class for most people. The lectures were nothing more than a vague skim over the textbook (which was dry, repetitive, and had spelling errors on every page), and most students ended up skipping class because of this. Earlier in the semester, the professor only read off of her powerpoint slides (perhaps because she was new), but she curbed this habit by the end of the semester.
The tests were the biggest source of my frustration. I never skipped a lecture, and can say with confidence that attending class does little to help you prepare for the tests, which are the only grades for the course. Three of them are unit tests, and there's one final, and the highest three of the four will be averaged, which becomes your overall grade. No homework, no essays, no clickers, nothing to cushion you. The professor will probably tell you to focus on "general" topics and "main ideas", but that isn't the case. The test questions often focus on minute details from the textbook, and tend to test your ability to memorize specific lines about famous psychologists and their theories rather than understand those theories or apply them to real-life situations. Judging by what I've heard from other students, I'm speaking for many when I say this. I'm a psych major who's always loved and excelled at the subject, so I'm a little bitter that this is my lowest grade this semester.

TL;DR Lectures were a waste of time, tests were confusing and had low content validity (lol), and understanding the material did not guarantee a good test grade. Even if you're good at memorizing facts but don't want to think critically about the material, I wouldn't suggest this course.