The worst class I've ever taken at UCLA. TAKE EEB100 TO FULFILL YOUR PSYCHOBIO MAJOR REQ, not this class. Exams completely destroyed my grade, I studied the exact same and scored 30% higher on the final because we had DOUBLE the time to answer the same number of questions compared to the midterm. This class should be a "scavenger hunt" because easily, for 30-40 of the questions, I am ctrl-f'ing the textbook to find some obscure, detailed, useless sentence to answer a multiple choice question that is ~1% of my grade. The exams did not test our grasp of the knowledge, just our ability to search things up. Some of the questions seemed to have been written from students as well, instead of from the prof. No lectures were accommodating for COVID, or recorded/podcasted. Slides are basically useless without the professor explaining them (obscure diagrams, sparse notes, etc). Read the textbook (first 10 chapters) back to front and you'll ace the class, good luck.

Professor Blaisdell is an approachable professor and you can tell he is enthusiastic about the subject. He encourages questions/discussion during lecture and takes the time to answer in detail.

My complaint is of his exams. 50% midterm, 50% final. Each exam was 40 MC and 10 short answer, so each question is worth 1% of your grade. The exams had some tricky questions, while others involved knowing useless detail that I think deviated from testing the important course concepts. So while I studied hard to understand the course concepts from the lecture slides and book, I ended with a worse grade than I think I deserved.

If you happen to take Professor Blaisdell for Psych 118, the most important thing you can do is memorize/understand everything on his slides, even the seemingly insignificant details. His exams take a few questions from the book, but the book is intensely dense. If you're interested in saving some time from reading, I took some pretty good book notes that I can email to you. Email me at *************.

He is such an amazing professor. While the subject matter was not always interesting, he made it a bit more interesting. He brought in his own experience with rat/pigeon experiments, which were pretty cool to learn about. He is also very helpful in office hours. Some of the examples were complex so that it wasn't easy to follow/understand during class just from the slides, but if you go to office hours, he'll explain in great depth and you'll get a lot out of it. He really does care about his students. In regards to reading, read the chapters and take good notes. Anything in the book, even if not covered during class, is fair game. Also, be sure to note which experiments/concepts he reiterates on. Those will most likely be on the test! And go to the midterm review session. The TA has already seen the test.