PSYC 4603

Prof Patterson is awesome! The topics are really current and interesting, she makes the Monday morning dreariness pretty bearable. Class is half her presentation, half a movie or in-class debate. Very fair grader and manageable amount of work. Take it!!

Professor Patterson is an extremely sweet and accommodating person, and brought us a couple treats in class. However, I just didn't do as well as I wanted to in class. Your grade is based almost entirely on papers (midterm and final), and you get a week to view the prompts and complete them. I guess I just didn't connect points the way Professor Patterson wanted me to, and I felt like it was impossible to give her what she wanted. Most of the time, I felt like class was really arbitrary and unstructured too. Professor Patterson is also a WGS professor and I feel really strongly that this should've been a WGS class, which I know are mostly writing, which I never would've taken. In my opinion, this class has absolutely nothing to do with psychology and just spits out demographical info. Don't take this class expecting to learn anything scientific. If you think you will like the subject matter and are a good writer, then you might like it. This class is very LGBTQ friendly and we talk a lot about it.

This class is amazing!! I genuinely learned so much about the logic of the material and subject as well as viewpoints from all sorts of angles. The professor sets up these debates that you show preference for (as you'll have to do one) but doesn't give you the decision for debating the PRO or CON side. This forced all the students to flesh out their arguments in captivating ways where we'd then spend half the class watching groups going over work. Prof Patterson herself has published an immense amount of research on the subject and is honestly the dream professor for the subject. Exams are also entirely written and not multiple choice, so she challenges your understanding in a meaningful way.

My only complaint is that the class is somewhat biased towards non-gender-conforming or LGBTQIA+ folk. For instance, one student (along with the professor), at one point the class was making light of a PhD's expertise saying they don't know simple biology in regards to the gender of a fetus claiming that it goes back in forth. In PSYC 2700 it is taught by the textbook, by the internet, and by the professors that it's standard biology for male sex differentiation to occur around week 7. I can't recall the exact context, but they were joking about something that is 100% factually incorrect and felt weird as I'd prefer to be in a class that's factual rather than emotionally driven in some regards. Otherwise, it's an amazing course and am very happy that I took it.