This is a Psyc 1 (frosh general psyc) class. Yesterday he spent 20 minutes lecturing on how morning sickness happens during the second trimester, is caused by eating spicy foods, and is a good predictor of developmental delays in the child.
Today he emailed the study guide for our first exam.
The list below is long, but I pasted the whole thing because it just boggles me. None of the content below is covered in the syllibus (sp?), nor has he mentioned covering any of it during the course lectures.
Is he crazy or am I?
Below is a list of essay questions which are your study guide:
Compare and contrast the great philosophers and their opinions on the mind and body connection.
Compare and contrast structuralism and functionalism. How did they impact modern psychology?
How can you use psychological concepts to improve your study skills?
What are the contributions and limitations of psychoanalysis?
Discuss the benefits behaviorism brought to the field of psychology.
How did cognitive psychology begin?
How does the area of evolutionary psychology affect psychology today?
Choose a psychologist and discuss his or her influence on the field of psychology.
Discuss the impact on psychology of women and non-whites.
Compare and contrast three different theoretical approaches in psychology.
What are the dangers associated with procrastination?
Assess the benefits and limitations of using measurements in psychological research.
Describe the differences between construct validity and predictive validity, and give an example for each.
Name at least three measurements in a frequency distribution, describe them, and explain how to find them.
What are demand characteristics? Give at least three examples of how to control demand characteristics.
Describe the major reason that causation cannot be derived from a correlation and at least two ways to try to control the problem.
What is the third-variable problem, and how does it relate to experimentation in psychology? Give examples.
Describe an experiment and come up with a hypothesis, and list the independent variable, dependent variable, control group, and experimental group.
Define internal and external validity, and give different examples for each one.
Give three reasons why psychology can still learn from experiments using nonrandom sampling, and give at least one example for each reason.
List at least three rules of ethics psychologists must follow when conducting an experiment, and explain why each rule is important in maintaining the safety and well-being of the participants.
One analogy used to capture important features of the action potential is that neurons “fire” just like guns. What aspects of the action potential does this analogy communicate? What aspects do not hold true for neurons?
After the release of neurotransmitters following an action potential, the synapse between two neurons may contain a mix of chemicals. What mechanisms act to recover from the transmission and prepare the neurons for another potential?
When walking home alone late one night, you are startled by a moving shadow that you glimpse out of the corner of your eye. Which division of the autonomic nervous system mobilizes your body’s defenses? What does it do? Later, when you see that the shadow is just the neighbor’s cat, what division of the autonomic nervous system is acting, and how does it lessen your physiological arousal? How do these autonomic divisions differ from the other main division, the somatic?
The areas of the cerebral cortex called “lobes” are identified from surface gyri and sulci. For each lobe, describe its relative position and major functions.
The somatosensory and motor cortices appear to have a “map” of the complete body across the cortical surface from the top to the bottom. Describe aspects of this “map” of the body and how it differs from a drawing of the body in perspective.
Two specific areas of cortex have been labeled as “Broca’s” and “Wernicke’s” areas. Describe how patients behave with lesions (i.e., selective damage) in these two areas. Following the idea of different locations for language functions, what other language processes might be similarly independent?
When a split-brain subject is presented with a stimulus, parts of the stimulus may go to different parts of the brain, and because the normal connections are severed, difficulties in processing the image may result. Design a test that will determine whether a subject is a true “split-brain” subject. Be specific about how you will test the subject, and explain why it works.
Describe what is known about the differences in processing between the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
Several imaging techniques are now used to compare behavior to the functioning of specific areas of the brain. Describe three of these techniques and suggest the types of research questions they may answer.
What is a good definition of death? What measures of brain function from scientific studies have been applied in clinical questions regarding “brain death?”
Sometimes you get the loons, what can I say. Having said that, I took a biological psychology class ten years ago, and can still answer most of those… and bs my way through the rest. Without specific references to assigned material, he can’t be looking for very specific answers either. It’s important to realize that.
Also, as a pregnant lady, I promise you all those things about morning sickness are lies.
Yes, having birthed three kids I did know the stuff about morning sickness was bunk, that’s why I added it here.
As for the study guide, shouldn’t he be testing us on stuff that he or the readings are actually covering in class? There’s no way he’s getting though all that in the first three weeks of class, and that’s when the exam is scheduled.
Jesus Christ. For the essay portion of my Psych tests were usually given 4 possible questions on the study guide. Not 31. And they’d usually choose three for the test of which we only had to answer two so you could just ignore one of the questions if the subject matter didn’t interest you.
Yup, looneroni for sure. For my psych 101 class, my professor brought in pics of her dead fetus to pass around. Seriously, she delivered at something like 6months and this was way before 24-25 weekers even had a chance. The dead baby was all dressed up and it was just bizarre to share that with a class!
She did all kinds of weird stuff, talked about strange things. I mostly liked her though even with the craziness.
From my skimming of the list, they all seem to be perfect appropriately essay topics for an introductory psychology course. It’s not as if you have to answer all of them, just pick a few from this broad menu…
The essay questions seem to be urging you to think for yourself and do some research. Challenging but not loony, IMO. One would hope for a ‘here’s why I set you these questions’ explanation afterwards. If no explanation then, maybe, a bit loony.
The morning sickness thing certainly sounds nutty - could it have been a very dry joke? Did the professor cite any studies? Could it have been a test to see if you can think for yourselves and challenge authority?
Not when it’s a study guide, and you don’t know which ones will be on the test. The point of a study guide is to cover everything you need to know for a test.
I also detest testing on things that are not covered in class or syllabus. Surely a psychologist, who should be aware of testing techniques, knows that an essay test on knowledge you have not covered is not indicative of what you have learned in class–which is the point of the grades you get in a class.
Also, psychology does seem to attract loons, and teaching psychology attracts people who don’t know how to deal with people well enough for clinical settings. (I’m not trying to imply that even most psychologists or psych teachers are crazy–just that crazy people often want to be psychologists.)
IMO that’s a good semesters worth of work for Psych 101, and might be a final exam study guide. I think there’s a miscommunication, or he sent the wrong list. That can’t be the range of stuff you are expected to know for your first 101 test.
I took Psych 101 last semester. They sound like reasonable questions for a final exam. But for a first test, it’s way too much. As you (and others) say, there’s no way he can go through that in three weeks. Is it possible that this is meant to be a study guide for the whole semester, and only the first few questions apply to the upcoming test?
You don’t go to my school, so YMMV, but if you were a classmate of mine I’d say that it doesn’t matter what the lecturer actually goes over in class - find out what you need to know from your syllabus, then look it up in your textbook. My lecturers told us this all the time at the beginning of the year.
Thank you for all the replies. It’s helpful to get other people’s take on the situation.
Yes, he was quite clear that this is the study guide for the first exam. He also said that between the book and the lectures we’d get possibly 60% of the material, but none of it is on the syllabus :dubious:
In any case with the morning sickness stuff, the Lewis Carroll recitation, the jujitsu demonstration and the fact that he gave the same exact power point lecture two days in a row, I think he’s not really a good fit for me so I’ve dropped the class. And I’ve managed to add a social psyc class that seems really interesting.
I’m looking forward to learning all of that stuff from another instructor next semester.
Wow, that does sound crazy. Then again, I’m biased, as the only useful thing I got out of my Psych 101 class was that it was right after my Advanced Organic Chemistry class, so I could get started on my homework right away while still looking like I was taking notes and paying attention.
I haven’t read the text(s) you are using or attended lectures, but all those questions seems fairly basic (as in, have probably been covered to one degree or another and/or require students to formulate a reasonable response based on basic concepts covered).
Some professors like to send out such “study guides” as a way of compelling students to actually READ or re-read the text, do some research on their own, and generally put in some extra time they wouldn’t otherwise spend if given a shorter list or told further ahead of time exactly what was going to be covered.
Looks very similar to one I got last term from a professor in a class on thinking, rationality and logic. As it turned out, only something like 8 questions, including 2 essay, were on the exam, but as no-one knew WHICH 8, we had to make sure we were familiar with ALL the topics listed (and we should have already been if we had been doing the reading, the assignments and paying attention, which was, of course, his intent.)
If there are topics included which have not, in any way, been covered, it may just be a way TO somehow cover them (always a problem fitting everything into a class schedule, esp. with such a broad-ranging subject). If students are forced to at least look up and become familiar with everything in a long list to study for a test, it can sort of round out the syllabus.
As for whether your prof. is crazy or not, I have no idea.
ETA that it seems at least some of what is on that list WOULD have been covered at the very beginning of a freshman pscyh class (I’ve taken one)…you don’t mention a text. Could it be that he is relying strongly on the readings in compiling the list? Just wondering.
This is insane enough that I would seriously consider talking to the head of the department or dean. Seriously crazy and not a good fit for any student. Did you discuss this with others in your class?
I recommend you take caerful notes in class, using a voice recorder for the lectures if possible. Save any emails and print them out. Put the whole thing together in December with a letter explaining how you thought this professor was a lunatic, and why, and be sure to include all the lectures and emails, etc.
Or don’t schools want to know then they have crazy, ineffective people taking money from them?
ETA: be sure you check on when the last day a professor can alter a grade is. I’d hate to see your A turn into a D.
If you think he is nuts turn him in. I recently watched a show on the professor from Huntsville that lost it and killed her peers in a meeting. The students interviewed said she was acting strangely. She was let go by the school because of the complaints but was finishing up when she lost it. She had a hidden past and it turned out she killed her own brother as a teen. She also tried to blow up a man that fired her with a pipe bomb. She was never charged with the previous crimes until she opened fire during a staff meeting.
I’d do it because I would not want to be there if/when he has a full melt down. He may just be odd but you can never be too careful.
It’s funny when you can see when someone obviously hasn’t read the thread before responding.
moejoe, social psychology sounds cool to me, too. I love the idea of studying why groups of people do the things they do - it’s interesting when it’s individual people, but it gets fascinating when it’s groups.
I don’t know if your professor is crazy or not. My Psych 101 instructor presented the same lecture for the first two weeks of class and after that those of us who were still attending tuned out.
Wish I could remember the outcome of it but it was decades ago and I can’t remember if our test was on that single lecture or not. In retrospect I suspect he was either 'round the bend or was using the class as lab rats in some (unethical) experiment he was conducting so he could complete his PhD.
Having spent my final career in the wellness biz it’s fair to say that those in the psychiatric area of it who are not crazy when they begin will become so within several years of clinical practice. Perhaps the same is true for college instructors.
Good luck to you on this. Every experience is a learning experience if you keep your eyes, ears and mind open.
