Highly recommend this class with Vaish. Your grade is based on homeworks and exams. 3 midterm exams, no final. The exams are super straightforward and require a couple of hours of studying the night or two before. The content is fun too! Vaish can be a bit cold sometimes but overall found her to be an efficient lecturer. I heard the other professor is much harder, so take this class with Vaish if you can. An awesome easy A filler class for your schedule!!
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1Lecture (1)
You can expect a straightforward, generally low-stress class covering child development with engaging videos and guest talks, though students with prior psychology coursework often find the material dry or overly basic. Your grade typically hinges on three non-cumulative midterms and frequent short quizzes, making consistent attendance and targeted review of both lecture slides and textbook bold terms absolutely necessary. The instructor is consistently praised for being incredibly kind and supportive, but recent semesters have shifted grading away from participation points, meaning exams carry full weight and skimming the readings is no longer a safe strategy for a top mark. If you leverage the quiz drops and study the specific terminology closely, it remains a reliable GPA booster, but treating it as a filler class or underestimating the midterm detail will quickly ruin your final grade.
39 Reviews
I took this class as a CS integration elective and it was very low stress and enjoyable. I had taken a psychology class here at UVA before so this class was very similar. Professor Vaish is very understanding. Each midterm is worth 20% and they are not cumulative. In addition, you get 2 quiz drops at the end of the semester.
#tCFS24
A wonderful course! It actually made me want to have a kid, beware of the amount of baby videos shown in class. Overall I learned a great amount about human development and so many things made sense that hadn't before! I loved learning about the intricacies of language development, motor skills and communication as you go through child development. Professor Vaish was very passionate, engaging and a wonderful lecturer! Highly recommend this class. No work outside of the periodic exams, which weren't overall too difficult compared to biology exams.
Prof Vaish was so understanding and overall a great lecturer. Her lectures could be a little boring at times but overall they were pretty interesting to someone interested in psyc. She provided helpful lecture slides and it wasn't hard to keep up as she frequently asked if we needed more time on certain slides while we took notes. Exams weren't hard to do well on as long as you take notes in class and read the textbook. I found reading the assigned chapters to be extremely helpful because the exams contained questions about textbook material that wasn't covered in-depth during lecture, but you could get by without doing those readings if you weren't aiming for an A. Overall a great class and would recommend to anyone.
PSYC 2700 was a pretty good course. As a psych minor, I found the material to be unchallenging but still interesting. I was able to study by simply reading through my notes a couple of times and still do really well on the exams. Compared to classes like Willingham's Cognitive psychology, it lacked a lot of the complex theories and instead taught a lot of factual knowledge. But it was cool to learn about children's development and the intriguing tidbits of information about their minds. Who knew that newborns can tell the difference between any speech sound, but then lose this ability after a few months? Professor Vaish was a good lecturer and clearly very kind. She cut us some slack a few times with the post-class quizzes (which were already extremely easy). The only work other than the tests and quizzes were the readings, which weren't bad. Also, the videos and movies we watched were super adorable and interesting. I recommend this class, but I wish it challenged me a bit more.
I loved this class! Vaish is an amazing professor and does a great job of organizing her slides and points. There is a good amount of reading but definitely worth it in my opinion. Your grade is comprised of 25% 3 or 4 question quizzes after each lecture (super easy if you paid attention and took notes), and 3 midterms each worth 25%. The midterms were extremely fair and I thought I was well prepared for them. I would recommend making flashcards for the midterms. I absolutely loved having so many guest lecturers who were all so passionate about their work and made all of this material so fun! Lots of reading for this class (definitely go slow and take notes, then go back and review material mentioned in class, although you should be familiar with everything from the textbook before the exam). Definitely possible to do well in this class! The no electronics policy was strange to me in the beginning but she was extremely polite about it and I think it helped me learn. 10/10 recommend!
This is probably my favorite psychology course I have taken while at UVA. I am a psychology major and this is one of the few required courses. Professor Vaish is a great teacher and while it sounds cliche she is always available to help students. We spent 15 minutes of the last lecture talking about our semester in general especially since the beginning of it was still marked by weird COVID restrictions. The material learned in the course was pretty interesting and I found most of it to be new from other classes I've taken. Overall I'd say about 60-75% of what Professor Vaish talked about in lecture was discussed in the reading, so if you read before lecture things will make a lot more sense. The grade in the class is determined by 3 midterms worth 25% each and short 3-4 question quizzes after every class, and for us the lowest 2 were dropped. For me studying for exams was never difficult, it's very attainable to get an A if you read and show up to lecture.
Don't take this class if you are looking for an easy A. It may come easier to you if you are a Psych major but otherwise I would steer clear. Your whole grade is based on multiple choice questions: 75% for 3 mc exams + 25% for post-lecture quizzes. The lectures are rushed because they cover more information than they should. Interesting class with helpful parenting tips, but not a grade booster by any means.
This class was definitely not an easy A as I had expected it to be based on older reviews. Prof. Vaish was super nice, but she went pretty fast in her lectures which made it hard to absorb the material in full. The lectures were also relatively dry, as she would pretty much just read the bullet points on the lecture slides with some added information. I definitely felt much more engaged during the couple of guest lectures with Dr. Stern compared to Vaish's lectures. As other reviews mentioned, she got rid of iClicker points, which meant that 100% of the grade was made up of exams (3, 25% for each) and short quizzes after each class (25% total, worst few dropped). It was definitely hard to follow her at times, especially in the first section of the course which went over a lot of material very quickly. The first exam was also a lot more difficult than I was expecting, which (due to the new grading scale) made it impossible to get anything above a B. #tCFspring2022
This class is a lot harder than people initially thought!! The exams are difficult because they are meant to trick you. Also, Professor Vaish is such a sweet person but she talks incredibly fast and it's hard to write everything down that she's saying. If you're taking this as a filler class, I would suggest something else.