PSYC 4200

I'll start off by saying that Adema is an amazing person and genuinely cared about our success not only in the course, but the future as well. She talked to us a lot about how we could use information presented in the class in research/medical careers, and also brought up issues of diversity and discrimination in science throughout the semester. That being said, this course was one of the most stressful courses I have taken. One major issue I had with the class was the TA, who had little to no experience in the material in the field of biology based neuroscience. As you can probably assume, this posed huge problems for office hours (every time I went they weren't able to answer my question, one time which was can you just explain something from lecture, and deferred me to the professor) and the exams that were written by her (subjective, unclear, and open to many different scientific interpretations). The subjectivity of the exams wouldn't be a problem if Adema was open to throwing questions out or adding points back for ambiguity, but she wasn't. There have been questions on exams where lines in the textbook have directly contradicted exam answers, but still no budging after we brought this to her attention. The subjectivity was made worse by the "personal trajectory," and while I understand that this was implemented in order to make things easier on us, it had the exact opposite effect because we were constantly stressed about our grades and had no grasp of our standing. Basically instead of exams for 50% of the grade, it was how you improved your thinking throughout the semester using exams as checkpoints, and including your participation in class and on Piazza (even though there is a separate participation grade).

Also for exams, prepare to READ because she tells you to just read the textbook for them, even though a majority of the information in the textbook isn't talked about class, and exam questions are often nitpicky questions on individual sentences.

Not recommended unless you're already good at neuroscience. Prof Ribic changed her grading policy halfway through the semester because several people got curved down during the first exam. Breakdown: personal trajectory 50%, participation 10%, professionalism 10%, final 30%, extra credit 10%. The personal trajectory thing is very arbitrary: you're not compared with other students, and there are progress points which you have little if you don't progress across checkpoints 1-3. Lectures are not mandatory but you'd better go to class for participation, and exam questions are easier if you listen to lectures. There is also a short paper for extra credit but if you don't go to class/OH, you'll never know how to do it because the details are not in the syllabus/emails. Prof Ribic certainly wants to help her students do well, but the class is still disorganized.

Adema Ribic is one of the worst professors in uva. She changed her grading policy after the first midterm. However, the personal trajectory policy was extremely unclear. The class was not mandatory, yet lecture attendance was still factored into the participation grade. The class was very disorganized and her office hour was not helpful at all. This professor simply has no idea about pedagogy.

I don't really know what I was expecting from this class considering classes were online for Fall 2020, but it definitely was not this. Professor Ribic means well, but all I learned from an entire semester of studying neural mechanisms is that action potentials need sodium. Aside from the fact that Professor Ribic changed the entire syllabus halfway through the semester and our midterm exam grades were meaningless, the class was genuinely one of the most disorganized classes I've taken during my time at UVA. Exams were entirely book based, yet lecture attendance was still factored into our participation grade. Our TA wrote the exam questions, which a lot of times were unclear and required you to think about what answer Professor Ribic wanted rather than what the right answer was. Additionally, she stated that she made the final worth such a large percentage of our grade because of how hard the semester had been. Professor Ribic clearly wants her students to succeed and cares about the class, but fails to give the necessary materials to do so. I would really only recommend the class to people who have taken several other neuro classes and have a lot of lab experience, because otherwise, you will spend a majority of the class lost and confused.