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4 Ratings
Hours/Week
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— Students
I loved this class. Subjective Well-Being and Happiness was one of my favorite courses in the Psychology department. (The other one was Abnormal Psych with Professor Coan - 10/10 recommend.) The second hardest part of this class was the fact that professor Diener requires perfect attendance. I'm not kidding. If that's not something you think you can do, don't sign up for this class. The first hardest part for me was keeping up with the weekly intervention assignments you are given. After one of the early assignments had me meditate for 20 minutes 3 times during the week and journal about it, I essentially gave up on them. I like meditation, but I just couldn't dedicate the time to the interventions that they wanted. It would have severely hurt my grade if I hadn't gotten a 99% on the final project. (Don't bank on this, or you'll get a C at best.) Aside from being strict in these two aspects, I found Professor Diener's class completely enjoyable. He's funny, and he gives you the chance to be really creative with the final project. I made a board game, and even though we used over 50 research articles to support the format of the game, I chose a good group to work with and it was a lot of fun. You can submit your project proposal to be considered for class presentation (which can boost your grade). For me, the content and fun lectures made it worth the attendance requirement which, let's be real, I still can't believe I met. The exams are standard multiple choice difficulty for the Psych department, but Diener gives you everything you need to do well.
This class is super interesting and Ed is such a great person. There is a TON of outside work and you actually have to keep up with it. You also have to attend lectures as there is a clicker quiz every day and you need to take notes as your notebook is collected on a random day and graded. This sounds like a lot, but if you can keep up with it, it is actually a grade booster and helps if you don't do as well on the exams, which can be tricky. Overall, good course and totally doable.
I was really looking forward to this class because of the reviews, but it has definitely changed over the years. We had reading assignments or videos we had to watch every week which added up. Plus, Ed would lecture on the same exact topics in class (and even use the exact same PowerPoints sometimes), so everything was super repetitive. The material itself was a lot of common sense, but I still found the exams to be very tricky. He asks about a lot of things that we didn't focus on in class (studies we only talked about a few times, the people who conducted the studies, the results, etc.). I liked Ed as a person, he was pretty funny and told us a lot about his personal life, so I felt like I knew him very well, but I wasn't a fan of his teaching style sometimes or his exams. There are only 2 exams, clicker quizzes every class (sometimes with VERY tricky questions. One time only 1/3 of the class got it right, but he still counted it...), notebook checks (so you have to come to every class for the quizzes and to take thorough notes), and these survey things and journals you have to do outside of class for his own research to measure your happiness. Overall, I thought the material was interesting and enjoyed the class, but I was expecting to get a better grade than I did (I got a B+), and sometimes Ed just really annoyed me with his repetitiveness and his confusing clicker/exam questions that he would do nothing about.
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