Amber Ankowski is known for her Psych 100B. She kept her exam practices from 100B to other courses like 133B, such that some exam questions are framed rather ambiguously. Besides, her lectures and slides may not always be helpful. One thing worth mentioning is that even though the final was made online and consisted of 100 T/F questions that she claimed to be 'significantly simplified', the median score was still lower than the midterm and I personally thought some of those questions were trickier than multiple choices. I know that reviews on Bruinwalk might be biased, like mine and the one who scored an A+, but most of my friends who have taken Ankowski's courses left extremely bad impressions on her. In my opinion, she's just trying everything possible to kill your GPA.

Professor Ankowsi is an absolute angel. She is one of the best lecturers I've had and considering this was an 8 AM class it made a huge difference. She is clear and engaging in the concepts she explains. The class is very straightforward and I could not recommend is more. 2 paper assignments, fairly simple, just had to formulate a paragraph response to 4 distinct questions pertaining to analyzing some outside material and related to cognitive development. The exams are pretty straight forward in my opinion. I just listened closely to the lectures and took diligent notes and I got an A on both exams. Of course it helps to read the textbook if you're confused but I found it to be time consuming and not worth it as long as you pay attention to every word Ankowski says (the slides posted aren't enough).

This is an enjoyable and interesting class. The content is really interesting the professor clearly cares about what she is teaching. Your grade is made up of participation points (iClicker), biweekly extension assignments/quizzes, a research project, one midterm, and a cumulative final. The assignments are all straightforward and not time-consuming at all. Your lowest extension assignment and quiz is dropped. The exams are online, open book, and consist of multiple choice and short answers. The questions are not difficult as long as you take some time to study. The professor is kind and her lectures are engaging. The only downside of this class is that you need the textbook for assignments and it’s difficult to find online, so you will likely have to buy it. If you need a Psych elective that won’t stress you out too much, this is a great class to take.

Overall this class was fairly easy and had a very manageable workload. Both the midterm and final were online, open note, and not proctored. The final is cumulative. Lectures were recorded on bruin cast, but Prof Ankowski has iClicker questions that are required for participation points. Personally I did not read the textbook and still did well in the class, and almost every answer to questions on the exams could be found in the lecture slides insted of the textbook. I do not think that you need to read the textbook for this class, and you can definitely get an A without reading it. Prof Ankowski is a great professor with clear, interesting, and easy-to-follow lectures, and she is super open to answering student questions/encourages people to come to office hours. The assignments for this class consist of 4 10-question multiple choice online quizzes, 4 short written assignments, 1 written research assignment where you basically just summarize and relate an existing study to class material, iClicker participation, and the midterm and final exams. This is a fairly manageable and easy class that doesn't require a ton of effort, and should be mostly review if you've taken a developmental psych class before.

1. Professor Ankowski is very passionate and knowledgeable about cognitive development. However, I find her lectures a tad disorganized, and her slides not helpful for review. I understand she wants people to attend lecture, as seen in her commitment to iClicker, but the lack of information present on the slides (while it may encourage people to come to class), is not helpful for review purposes. However, she records the class, which is a helpful addition. Moreover, this may be a personal preference, but I appreciate when professors explicitly define a term before they provide examples. Professor Ankowski sometimes does not provide definitions of terms/concepts or maybe breezes through them and then starts providing example after example. While examples are helpful, they ultimately mean nothing out of context, which she only loosely gives. I have had a surplus of upper-division psychology professors who I have enjoyed, and these issues seem unique to this class. On a separate note, I found that the midterm was not equitable to the types of questions we have been given on quizzes. The quizzes are almost too easy, whereas the midterm seemed unreasonably difficult. The wording of the questions was the most abstract. Furthermore, she opened her first lecture up by saying she is unwilling to revise grades, which is fine and completely up to her, but her presentation was very stern and seemed unfriendly. Since, I have not felt comfortable asking questions or even participating in class.

Overall, I really enjoyed this class. I thought that Professor Ankowski did a really great job at presenting the material in a manageable but also engaging way. She is a really good speaker and is very knowledgeable on the topic, which makes the whole lecture flow.

Fairwarning, lectures are 2 hours and she uses the whole 2 hours. All of the lectures are recorded, however, attendance is taken using iclicker.

The course consists of 5 or 6 labs. Some of them are individual, some are group work, so it's nice to establish a consistent group of friends/classmates to work on the labs together with. The labs themselves are pretty straightforward and easy.
I thought that the midterm and final were both also very easy. Both tests had an mcq portion and a short response part. There are a lot of terms to know, so it helps if you’re good at memorizing things. I used quizlet as my main study method. ALSO Prof. Ankowski provides you with the Pysch test bank as a study resource. USE IT. It was so helpful for both the midterm and final. A lot of the question were very similar, so it was a great practice test.

I really enjoyed this class! I took it freshman year, and even though the 8 am was brutal, the prof was super engaging and passionate on the subject. Her lectures were clear and slides were helpful for studying. the Midterm was online open note, and the final was in person closed note. would recommend ankowski!!

Overall, I highly recommend Psych10 for all students, even those who are not considering majoring in psychology/psychobiology. I came into this class having absolutely zero background knowledge about psychology (I did not take AP Psychology in high school), yet I I felt like this class does a great job of easing you into the material. Some of my Psych10 classmates took AP Psychology in high school and said that this class was easily manageable. The material that I learned while taking Psych10 has come up in numerous other classes of mine (in communications, sociology, and linguistic-based classes), so the information you learn will serve you well regardless of if you are a psychology major or not. Professor Ankowski is a very engaging lecturer, and she teaches in an interactive way which definitely helps make the 2-hour lecture go by faster. She posted recordings of each lecture after class. Attendance is taken using iClicker (where you answer live questions based on lecture material that are not graded. The class is composed of one in-person midterm, one in-person final, a few online quizzes every week or so, article analysis projects (where you read a scientific journal and answer questions about the article's main findings), and in-class labs which are widely-applicable and not difficult. Your weekly assignments will definitely help you boost your grade if you do not perform as well on the midterm/final, so definitely make sure you put effort into those. The midterm and final are manageable if you master the material you learn in class - I recommend looking over slideshows and rewatching lectures.

The class was clear and straightforward. Definitely pay attention to the labs because those got brought up a lot during the exams and make sure to work on the practice tests. Overall the professor was very nice and had a lot of energy with it being an 8am lecture.

This class was not really what I expected. Most of the reviews said this class was easy but it did not always feel that way. I will say that the grade distribution was great with 10% of our grade being participation (in person through iClicker and online discussion boards), 33% homework, 10% homework quizzes, 17% midterm, and 33% final exam (cumulative). The in-class participation was not bad - just a couple of iClicker questions during each lecture. They were not graded on accuracy, just completion. For the discussion board posts, you could either make your own or respond to someone else's (either way, you received the same credit). You only had to do this for 3 out of the 10 weeks, so if you did a substantive response/post for the first three weeks, you wouldn’t have to worry about it for the rest of the quarter. The homework assignments were a lot more length. It often required you to watch a movie or do an activity with at least three other people. This professor really did not like “fluffy” responses and preferred students get straight to the point when answering the questions on the homework. Usually, each homework assignment had 3-4 questions. She did not have a set word minimum or maximum but provided a rough guideline of 500 words for the whole homework assignment. These were graded pretty fairly, as long as the TA could tell you actually interacted with the material. Another big part of the homework assignment was the reading “Bringing Up Bookmonsters”. It is a book that was written by the professor and her husband. Overall, it was really interesting and fairly intuitive. She assigns part of the book throughout the quarter so that you read through the whole thing by the end. Sometimes there would be questions about it in the homework assignments. The lowest-graded homework assignment was dropped. There were also weekly quizzes. These were open-book/note, had 5 questions, and had a 10-minute time-frame to be completed. Some of the questions I found a bit tricky, but they were overall very doable. The lowest-graded quiz gets dropped. The “Bringing Up Bookmonsters” book was also mentioned in these quizzes. The midterm was a little daunting. I think it was because we had to take it at 8:00 am but it was overall very fair. The exam was a mixture of multiple-choice and free-response questions. All material covered up to that point was fair game. A lot of students were not a fan of the fact that the professor used questions that had “All of the Above” or “None of the Above” but they were not too bad and did not show up that much (from what I recall). The TAs also hosted a review session for the midterm which was SUPER helpful (it was recorded as are lectures). The final exam was what I was really worried about. It was cumulative and covered everything we had encountered throughout the quarter (all lectures, all readings, all films, the entire book “Bringing Up Bookmonsters”, lecture videos, etc.). This one felt really hard to study for but it helped that the professor emphasized that the second half of the quarter was going to be emphasized on the exam. However, when I finally got the exam, the questions were not as intricate and more so discussed the broader lessons from the course. No extra credit is offered and there is no curve (grades are rounded up or down based on the final score; .50 and above rounding up and .49 and below rounding down). Overall, I would say that although this class is somewhat forgiving, I did feel a lot of pressure to secure the grade I wanted. Despite how challenging I thought it was at times, I did really enjoy this class. It taught me a lot and I took away a lot of info that I could apply to my personal life. I would recommend this class!