Very easy class, class was a bit long but not the Professors fault. USe her test bank for the midterm and final and you WILL get an A, the questions are almost identical. All the material for tests is on the slides and she won't try to trick you. She is such a sweet professor, and incredibly clear. You will definetly get a good introduction into the various fields of Psych with her!

Professor Paquette-Smith was genuinely such a joyful person and made lectures enjoyable and engaging.

She gave assignments early on and was very helpful in explaining what we had to do.

Overall, I really enjoyed this class and thought the content was very interesting!

I really recommend taking this class! If you took AP Psych in high school, the material is very similar. Professor Paquette-Smith is super nice. It is also not a bore to be in her class. The lectures were close to two hours, but they honestly flew by. She's also super organized. She followed the syllabus pretty strictly which I liked and had everything laid out for us on canvas. She also records her lectures.

Participation: She uses iClicker, but you don't have to be in class to answer the questions, so you could get away with not physically being there. The lowest 4 were dropped.
In-class labs: During the second lecture of each week we would have a in-class lab. It was basically an assignment on Gradescope. They weren't bad at all and during the last 50 minutes of class she would explain them and give time in class to do them or you can leave early. A couple assignment consisted of getting in a group and working with them to create an experiment that you would later have to test, but it was actually easy and fun. The lowest lab score is dropped.
Readings: She had a book online as an extra resource, but not required
Quizzes: Occasionally, she would assignment about 15 question multiple choice quizzes on canvas. We had a week to complete it and you can take as many times as you'd like. She also had to setting to where it would reveal which questions you got wrong. Your lowest one was dropped
Midterm: Was broken into an individual section and a group section. All in-person. You had an hour and 10 minutes to do 35 MC questions and 2 SA questions. During the remainder of the time you got with 4-5 students to then complete the same 35 MC questions as earlier. This really boosted my midterm grade so she's really awesome for that.
Final: All multiple choice and cumulative. Individually taken.
SONA: You had to do 6 hours of SONA credits which means being a research participant. Some have online ones, others are in person. You sign up and do it all on your own time. If you don't want to be a participant you can choose to write abstracts online instead.

Overall, I really enjoyed this class. The matter itself is interesting and it is very hard for you to fail.

This is class is very structured and organized, but I definitely, on my part, didn't study as much as I should have which sucks because I was 1 percentage away from an A-. However, the overall class is super fun and engaging! Melissa is a wonderful professor and you can tell she cares about her students and want them to succeed. The class have labs, quizzes, the midterm, and the final. The quizzes are just take home quizzes where you take them on BruinLearn and have unlimited times until you get 100%. The labs were sometimes group and sometimes individuals. In the middle of the quarter is when you start writing up lab reports (there's 2 I believe). I think the main things to focus on in this class is the exams. Since I was taking 3 other heavy classes, I didn't study as much for psych and that was my biggest mistake, so I definitely recommend taking this class if you know you have time to study for psychology. Melissa offers psych 10 test bank practice problems and outlines which helped me so much when studying, so I recommend you to look at those! As a result, I did pretty good on the midterm because of that, so make sure to study using those. Just for context, I had an A before the final and got a C on the exam bringing my grade down to a B+. Although I wasn't proud of myself, I knew it was also because I didn't have time to study for psych as much, so don't make the same mistake as me. Other than that though, I learned so much about psychology in this class and I would totally take this class again if I could! Whether you are taking this as a GE or a prereq it really is a fun intro psych class! Take this class!!!

Taking this as my first official psychology class was absolutely the best decision I could have made. Professor Paquette-Smith was so engaging in lecture and her slides provided you with the perfect amount of detail and explanation. The class consisted of one midterm and a final that made up a decent portion of your grade. However they weren't too challenging and there were many other assignments such as labs and participation to help make up for these tests. I did somewhat poorly on my midterm so this accounts for the B+ in the class, but if you study well enough for the midterm and final is fairly easy to receive and A or A- in the class. The professor and TA's also graded the labs and lab reports pretty easily as long as you had all the information and data that they asked for. Overall I really loved this class as well as the professor and would definitely recommend taking this class with her.