Tip to succeed in 100A: The textbook and personal trainer (supplemental online stuff) are your best friend. USE THEM BOTH.

Jaffe is down to earth and makes the class enjoyable. He seems very busy with his rehab clinic so it felt like lectures would be cut short. He spends a lot of time going over more basic concepts and the TEXTBOOK and PERSONAL TRAINER is where you will really get how to succeed on the test. When I took it, the other professor, Reise made the tests and they were based on the book publisher (Hurlburt). So I'd say definitely read your chapters well. For me, going to lecture was important because even though I was confused much of the time -- that confusion became the basis for me to get a general idea of what we're learning. Then I'd look into the book to understand further. Multiple choice tests, with few free response questions. Tests are more conceptual than computational, so know your concepts. If the book goes beyond the basic content to explore an abstract view of the content, pay attention. Those little things became test questions.

Use your book and personal trainer and you'll be fine! Jaffe was also very helpful in office hours, he'd also share things with us in office hours about the test that he wouldn't say in front of the class. Wish I went more, good luck!

Why Jaffe has good reviews is beyond me. He is by far the worst professor I have had at UCLA. He is incredibly lazy and never cared about his class. He would always ramble on about his addiction clinic, but didn't talk enough about the things that were important - like the actual material! Jaffe didn't even write his own damn test which made it incredibly difficult to study. If you have the option between Jaffe and Reise, take Riese. They both suck, but, at least, Riese writes the test so he will let you know what will be on them.

Jaffe was always in a good mood. He has a really cool story and I feel like he is the kind of person who probably has a lot of wisdom to share. As far as the class goes, the textbook SUCKED but he knew it did. It was online, had tons of typos, and explained things terribly. Luckily he was a good enough teacher that I could understand it without the book. Highly recommend him as a professor, but hopefully they've changed textbooks by now!

Selling the textbook of Psych 100A.

"Essentials of Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (2nd Edition)"

This book is the loose-leaf version, comes with binder. In very good condition.

If you are interested, contact me via email: *************

Selling the textbook of Psych 100A.

Jaffe has changed his syllabus and he now requires a new textbook "Essentials of Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (2nd Edition)"

This book is the loose-leaf version. No marks or notes. In very good condition, just like a brand new one.

If you are interested, contact me via email: *************

So all of the evaluations below are things that did NOT happen this quarter. We got a new text book, which meant all new exams. Plus, no more homework! Quizzes instead!

The quizzes were written by the TAs and fairly complicated. The exams are a bunch of true/false questions and very few math problems.

Jaffe is a really wonderful professor. He wants you to succeed and wants to be there for you, however he rarely has office hours and it can be hard to meet with him. If you treat this like any other psychology course, with an emphasis on learning more conceptually, you'll be just fine. But you'll have to curb how you learned statistics before, his class is less about math and more about understanding how and why something does what it does.

I took 100A with Dr. Jaffe (spring 2014) and got an A.

Professor: Dr. Jaffe is a great professor who genuinely wants to help you succeed. He's pretty honest because he outright tells you that Psych 100A is structured badly. Still, he does his best to help you with this shitty class.

He responds promptly to emails and he's incredibly helpful during office hours, where he's willing to explain concepts over and over until you get it. If you're struggling with the class, you should definitely email him and go to his office hours.

Lecture: He's animated and relatively entertaining during lecture. His Powerpoint slides aren't that great, but that's probably because he's taken them from another professor. He should have a go at writing his own Powerpoints.

Class also moves at a lightning pace so a background in statistics - like Stats 10 - is highly recommended if you want to keep up easily. We covered everything taught in a quarter of Stats 10 in 5 or 6 weeks.

Grading: 1 set of homework on every non-midterm week, 3 midterms and 1 final. All of the questions are recycled from the same small question bank of poorly-worded multiple choice questions. No TI calculator or formula book during the midterm and final.

To do well in the class, have a basic understanding of all the concepts. Then, get your hands on as many past papers as you can through the test bank (McAuliffe and Moran tests use the same question bank) and Jaffe's site. Memorise how to do the tricky past paper questions. Memorise how to do the tricky homework questions. Memorise how to do the tricky worded questions from your midterms(for the final). Yeah, pretty much just memorise everything, and you should do fine.

Section: It's helpful for review but you don't really need to attend, especially if you're willing to go to office hours and get more personalised attention instead.

Overall: The class is very do-able, especially if you're willing to sit down, learn the basic concept, and memorise all the questions. Dr. Jaffe is extremely helpful and has lots of good advice but even he admits that it's pretty much down to you and your willingness to "get" the question(through understanding or memorisation, or whatever). You should also do the 1% extra credit assignment he offers because you don't know if you're going to be a borderline case, like me.

Take Dr. Jaffe; he's pretty great. Listen to his advice - especially about the class -, because he's pretty much on point.

I liked Professor Jaffe and feel like he did the best he could with what was overall a super boring, pointless class. One tip: go over practice midterms/homework problems/practice finals at least twice before the test. Almost all problems are recycled from old tests (when we walked into the final he told us it was 80% practice problems) and they're all multiple choice so you can literally just memorize answers and get at least a B. Also, TAs Ben and Kevin were so helpful and concerned, so if you don't understand definitely go to section or office hours.

A very nice and entertaining professor. Sometimes the materials are presented in a really brief and hasty manner. As long as you do all the homework problems AND make sure to practice his old tests, you'll be good for the midterms and finals because he often recycles old test problems!

First of all the Psych dept should be ashamed of themselves for making us all go through the Bullshit of memorizing formulas and doing everything by hand, given that when you take 100B you will realize 100a is a total waste of time. We should be able to get the formulas given to us and just learn when to use what formula and what steps to take.
(sure if the world ends and all computers are destroyed we might need the knowledge of 100A to continue to conduct our research, and I guess since the book is online as well, that also justifies the memorization of formulas, since I don't have a physical textbook to refer back to. However I already forgot the formulas so I'd be screwed either way.)

As for the professor. He was ok, he just reads off of the power points he doesn't really explain anything. He gets to the point eventually which is the steps you need to take but he spends SO much time on the basic BS and then when he gets to the actual meet he speeds through it. Which is usually the case when prof's don't really know the material. I had to teach myself everything but from what I heard he was much better than Moran which seems to be the most horrible individual on the planet. Jaffe was nice though and if you ask something he was capable of explaining it I just don't like to be taught math with Powerpoint since it it difficult to follow along. So.. It is probably best to read the chapter several times and try to summarize the steps before you come to lecture then you can just use the lecture as a review/confirmation. I wish Jaffe would have structured it so that He would write down the steps on the board and say then you use this formula etc etc, and then go through examples for each type of topic, Instead of all this background info about scruffy dogs etc....

The tests are EXTREMELY similar to practice tests and homework problems, Most of them even identical. This is why it is crucial to know all those problems since most of the time identical problems are on the exam. (which defeats the whole purpose if you think about it since then you just memorize that and don't really learn anything anyway. Like awesome job UCLA way to go on that one really...)

However in the most retarded textbook I ever had to read, only available online which caused me to want to destroy my laptop on numerous occasions, there is ONE and a half good thing that you need. They have like a step by step solution thing for each type of problem ( which he usually copies and paste into ppt) what I did was I wrote down what type of solution we use for each type of problem, then the steps and the formulas for each steps, and memorized all of that. I then practiced to write all this out over and over. And as soon as I got my test I spent the first 5-10 minutes writing all those things down on one sheet of paper, so for example 1-sample Z test, steps solution Indep t test, dependent etc. That is what helped me the most since then I basically had a manual to use when I began looking at the exam questions and this prevented me from confusing what formula to use and what steps to take which MANY people did who just tried to keep everything in their heads. The book also has questions and summaries at each end of chapter those are good to know in addition to HW and practice test.

It is worth noting that something Jaffe did really pissed me off and caused me to get a B+ instead of an A, He said there would only be ONE question on Power on midterm 2, I was in a crunch and didn't have time to teach myself power as well so I skipped it since I knew everything else perfect, but the test ended up having 4 questions on power so I missed all of those resulting in me dropping a grade.
I heard that Moran had done something similar so to be safe make sure you really triple check exactly what is on each exam. But as long as you know the steps and formulas for each type of problem, and have done the homework and practice exams you will be fine.
It is also worth noting I did not either get a 100% on all HW since I didn't have a friend that had saved their old HW and thus be able to cheat that way and not really doing the HW. Majority of people had this so I guess that is helpful. But ah well.
There is a LOT of material in this class and the class moves quickly with a test every other week, the final was long and brutal and because we had one week to learn the last new stuff I confused myself on that material on the final, I should have in hindsight focused more on memorizing the practice final questions instead of understanding the material cause that was what most people did and they finished the final an hour before me, since I didn't remember all the answers so I actually had to do the calculations, I guess that is what you get for trying to be a good student and ACTUALLY learn and understand vs. being connected and having friends with all the homework answers and old exams to memorize.