Professor
Jesse Rissman
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2023 - Avoid taking this class with this professor if you can. He relies on a bunch of readings, his lectures don't really do much to help you digest the readings. Attendance is graded and midterm and final are most of your grade which is based on the readings. His lectures are boring and its easy to fall asleep to them sometimes. I had to drop the class after the midterm. I thought it was me who couldn't understand or learn the topics. A year later I took it again with a different professor and all I have to say that it was not me it was definitely the Professor. The class is hard and has lots of different topics to learn and digest. But this professor does not make that any easier, he was off on conferences some days and the TA had to substitute. My advice if your not a reader take it with anyone but him.
Fall 2023 - Avoid taking this class with this professor if you can. He relies on a bunch of readings, his lectures don't really do much to help you digest the readings. Attendance is graded and midterm and final are most of your grade which is based on the readings. His lectures are boring and its easy to fall asleep to them sometimes. I had to drop the class after the midterm. I thought it was me who couldn't understand or learn the topics. A year later I took it again with a different professor and all I have to say that it was not me it was definitely the Professor. The class is hard and has lots of different topics to learn and digest. But this professor does not make that any easier, he was off on conferences some days and the TA had to substitute. My advice if your not a reader take it with anyone but him.
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2022 - Rissman needs to learn to narrow down topics to the essential material he would like his students to learn, but instead, he dumps so much information in his lectures in order to test you on it all. He takes every minute of the lecture to do this, down to the last second. In the last lecture, he wanted to introduce a final concept to us and took the last 4-5 minutes to say what was on the slides, and said he expects to know it for the final. That is not real teaching or lecturing, imo. The workload includes "ZAPS" which are low stake modules, weekly 10-question lecture quizzes, iClicker polls for participation, discussion attendance, a term paper, the midterm, and the final. He made SONA extra credit more challenging by assigning 0.5 credits/1 hour instead of the usual 1 credit/1 hour, with the excuse that it will help researchers. Still, if he was really supportive of grad student researchers, he could take other action items that other professors have taken in support of their current UAW strike. He claimed to be sympathetic to the challenging midterm seeing many of us got low scores, so he gave everyone 5 points. For MC he likes to give 3 choices added with A & B and B&C, so it can be confusing.
Fall 2022 - Rissman needs to learn to narrow down topics to the essential material he would like his students to learn, but instead, he dumps so much information in his lectures in order to test you on it all. He takes every minute of the lecture to do this, down to the last second. In the last lecture, he wanted to introduce a final concept to us and took the last 4-5 minutes to say what was on the slides, and said he expects to know it for the final. That is not real teaching or lecturing, imo. The workload includes "ZAPS" which are low stake modules, weekly 10-question lecture quizzes, iClicker polls for participation, discussion attendance, a term paper, the midterm, and the final. He made SONA extra credit more challenging by assigning 0.5 credits/1 hour instead of the usual 1 credit/1 hour, with the excuse that it will help researchers. Still, if he was really supportive of grad student researchers, he could take other action items that other professors have taken in support of their current UAW strike. He claimed to be sympathetic to the challenging midterm seeing many of us got low scores, so he gave everyone 5 points. For MC he likes to give 3 choices added with A & B and B&C, so it can be confusing.
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2020 - One of the best professors I've had at UCLA. His lectures on bias and discrimination in policing were really insightful. He was always very approachable and I felt like I got so much more out of this class from his teaching style. He was super empathetic and supportive throughout everything going on during spring (COVID-19, BLM protests); during the protests, he even dedicated some class time to talk about how we felt. I agree with the other reviews, he truly cares about his students' success and wellbeing. All around, great professor and human being. Thank you Dr. Rissman!
Spring 2020 - One of the best professors I've had at UCLA. His lectures on bias and discrimination in policing were really insightful. He was always very approachable and I felt like I got so much more out of this class from his teaching style. He was super empathetic and supportive throughout everything going on during spring (COVID-19, BLM protests); during the protests, he even dedicated some class time to talk about how we felt. I agree with the other reviews, he truly cares about his students' success and wellbeing. All around, great professor and human being. Thank you Dr. Rissman!
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2018 - I took this course as Psych 124K (Legal, Ethical, and Societal Implications of Cognitive Neuroscience). This class was one of the best experiences I've had at UCLA! All students had to email Dr. Rissman prior to the course to express interest and we received an email with a PTE number should we be chosen. The class was a seminar style with 24 students. While Dr. Rissman lectured during our class meetings, he encouraged a lot of discussion and left plenty of time to allow for this. The lecture material was a great sampling of the various topics involving the ethics of neuroscience. I think he went into enough depth to get a good understanding of the material without it feeling shallow. Overall, Dr. Rissman is an incredibly nice guy. He's always willing to answer questions. The class was graded based off of class participation, two papers (one short paper and one longer paper), and a short-answer/paragraph final. Everything in this course was very fair and you can tell that Dr. Rissman cares more for sharing his knowledge and educating the students than meeting quotas or enforcing curves.
Winter 2018 - I took this course as Psych 124K (Legal, Ethical, and Societal Implications of Cognitive Neuroscience). This class was one of the best experiences I've had at UCLA! All students had to email Dr. Rissman prior to the course to express interest and we received an email with a PTE number should we be chosen. The class was a seminar style with 24 students. While Dr. Rissman lectured during our class meetings, he encouraged a lot of discussion and left plenty of time to allow for this. The lecture material was a great sampling of the various topics involving the ethics of neuroscience. I think he went into enough depth to get a good understanding of the material without it feeling shallow. Overall, Dr. Rissman is an incredibly nice guy. He's always willing to answer questions. The class was graded based off of class participation, two papers (one short paper and one longer paper), and a short-answer/paragraph final. Everything in this course was very fair and you can tell that Dr. Rissman cares more for sharing his knowledge and educating the students than meeting quotas or enforcing curves.
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