I was honestly terrified to take this class after reading the reviews, but I was pleasantly surprised with how this class turned out. Professor Wassum is one of the most amazing professors I have ever had. She genuinely cares about student learning, and would often be found answering student's questions on the BruinLearn discussion board into the early hours of the morning. However, there are a couple of things I wish I knew at the beginning of this class:
1. You don't need the textbook. I didn't read it beyond the first week of class. I found her lecture slides & lectures to be perfectly comprehensive.
2. Take very, very detailed notes. Dr. Wassum talks superrrr fast. She knows her stuff. With that being said, I'd often leave in-person lectures feeling pretty confused at times, but I'd go home & re-watch the lecture video about a day later & take notes to fill in any gaps I may have had. This often took a very long time, since I would pretty much pause the video every few minutes to write anything important down, but this process was soooo essential to my ability to understand & retain the information. On my first exam, I didn't perform very well, but was able to get 100% on my last 2 exams simply because I started to re-watch lecture videos & take more detailed notes.
3. Make a study guide for exams. For my first exam, I kinda just winged it. I studied a little bit, but I relied a little too hard on just knowing the exam was open book. For the second and third exams, I made study guides that focused on understanding the experiments/concepts she presented during lecture. The exams focus heavily on your understanding of the concepts in an experimental/real-world context, so explaining each experiment (what it was testing, what happened, what the results were, what it told us about learning, etc.) helped me soooo much on the tests. My study guides literally consisted of just pages and pages of each experiment explained, and I referred to this often during exams.
Overall, Dr. Wassum is a great professor who cares about her students and wants us to succeed. I would take this class again.

This was quite literally the most mind-numbingly boring class I have EVER taken at this school. Not only was the material incredibly tedious, but it was also quite difficult to comprehend. Don't take this class unless you want to learn about rats pressing levers for 10 weeks straight. I will forever hold hatred in my heart for psych 110.

Lectures are recorded, which is helpful because Professor Wassum has a confusing lecturing style and you'll almost certainly need to re-watch lectures to have any chance at understading what she is saying. She barely uses words on the slides, talks extremely quickly, and utilizes an overly complex vocabulary that makes already dense material even more difficult to digest.

Grading scheme is: 3 exams, online, synchronous, open note/internet, multiple choice, not proctored, not cumulative, each worth 25% of your grade. To help illustrate how difficult this class is, the average for the first midterm (again, an online, not proctored, open note exam) was a C. There are 10 weekly short writing assignments (worth 20% of your grade total) and 10 weekly quizzes, graded on completion, worth 5% of your grade total. Prof Wassum does not give any type of extra credit.

I would HIGHLY recommend avoiding this class at all costs. If you have to take this class, take it with a different professor.

This class was genuinely the worst class I have ever taken at UCLA and I also took Chem 153A in the same quarter. Professor Wassum used words that I have never heard in my entire life, causing me to have to stop the lecture recording to look them up so I could even comprehend what she was saying. Her lectures were recorded and posted in a timely manner on BruinLearn and that is how I watched them, however, I do not know how people who went to lecture were able to keep up with her at all since I need to pause constantly to either look up a word or take notes on yet the 50th rat-based experiment. With this, her lectures were all over the place with no organization in place. I felt like she was just speaking to fill time and space and her slides had no useful information. Most of the information was spoken through her lecture and my slides were full of handwritten notes in order to make sense of anything. Each experiment was so specific and tedious that you couldn't even miss one word when she explained them or you would be completely lost. There were 3 online tests, each one not cumulative which helped, and notes were allowed to be used. However, each test question was difficult to understand and had such long paragraphs on some that it took minutes to even understand the question. There was also a weekly assignment that was pretty straightforward and graded easily as well as a weekly quiz that was done for completion. However, I do not think that this class is worth it to take with Prof Wassum. Like I stated, I was taking Biochem at the exact same time and started to look forward to watching those recorded lectures just to get a break from Prof Wassum's confusing lectures on rats. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS WITH HER!

This class is pure hell. DO NOT TAKE IT WITH WASSUM. I repeat, do not take it with Wassum. You have been warned.

I'll never forget going to one of the TA's office hours and being surrounded by other people who had studied so hard like me, yet were averaging C's on the exam.

Her class isn't based necessarily on what you know, it is based on whether you can decipher her answer choices that are designed to trick you!

This is my first C+, I actually have never received anything lower than a B in a class and usually get B+/A- in all my classes and yet, I am really thankful for this C+. I honestly thought I was not going to pass.

Professor Wassum does talk pretty fast and she uses jargon that isn't accessible to everyone. Some of her test questions are worded very strangely. Reviewing the past quiz questions is also important as she does reuse questions from the weekly quizzes for the tests. I would recommend putting all the quiz questions on a doc to easily search through them. To study, I would go through the lecture slides and for each topic I would try to make a quick summary based on my memory. I would then rewatch the lecture for any parts I couldn't remember and add it to my study guide. Our class also made a study guide which helped a lot with Ctrl + F.
I didn't always go to discussion but if you're having trouble wit the concepts/didn't pay as much attention in lecture it's worth going to. In my discussion we just reviewed lecture concepts with examples. We got to take things a lot slower. I did not read the textbook after week 1 as the lecture slides were sufficient. It wasn't the worse class for me but I am pretty good at understanding fast-lecturers. The concepts can be tricky but none of them go too into depth either so they aren't too hard to explain.
You don't need to understand what happens in every experiment imo, you just need to understand the implication of the results. Wassum presents a lot of experiments and glosses over the details of their set-up sometimes but she never asks you to recall the exact set up of one specific experiment.

this class is not a walk in the park but it's not as completely awful as some of the reviews make it out to be. there is a lot of content covered in the class, and prof wassum does talk pretty fast, but she bruincasts which makes it easier to review after class. the first exam was definitely the hardest and everyone did a lot better on the second exam, so I think we all learned how to study and prepare better. the third exam/final was honestly easy compared to the previous two. just make sure to take as detailed notes as you can the first time around and rewatch the lectures to fill in any gaps before each exam. it also helps to make a group study guide and list of all the correct quiz questions since sometimes she pulls from those directly. anyways, it's a core class, and it's not supposed to be super easy!! you'll survive though.

This was the worst class I've ever taken at UCLA. Professor Wassum was not understanding about anything regarding extra help, curving exams, or even acting like a human when it came down to discussing grades. She was unhelpful and too focused on herself to care about her students. Don't take this class, take any other column A class, not 110.

I feel like I know a lot more about Pavlovian and Instrumental Conditioning after this class, but this course doesn’t explore any other concepts in depth. The class should really be called: Pavlovian and Instrumental Conditioning. If you value the breadth of concepts and information presented in a course, this may not be the best class to take. Professor Wassum clearly knows the subject matter very well, but the exams do seem to be very detail-oriented and require that you really take a moment to digest the material and apply it carefully. Overall, it’s not an easy A, but students definitely can get an A when questions on the tests are thoughtfully worded (this wasn’t the case with the first exam) and students put in the necessary work.

class was ok!

only homework is the weekly assignments, which are actually really helpful for understanding and applying the things we learn in lecture. i wouldn't worry too much about reading the textbook since exams are lecture-based but it probably would be useful. no quizzes or projects. lecture is both in person and live/recorded on zoom.

midterm 1 was definitely a wreck for me because of the way the exam itself was structured and how questions were presented (online, not allowed to go back on questions, distracting names). but since a lot of people complained, she changed the difficulty to make questions more conceptual and less based on experiments, which was really helpful. i think the hardest part of this class is understanding each question and differentiating between each answer choice, since a lot of them are similar but have distinct differences that make them right/wrong. i definitely struggled, but she gives practice exams with questions that are repeated in the actual exams plus a bonus extra credit where you explain a topic of your choice.

tldr; not the easiest class, but doable with studying!

Professor Wassum was a great teacher! Any of the previous negative reviews definetly do not apply to her last quarter. Our grades were soley based on weekly assignments and exams. The weekly assignments were pretty much a guaranteed 100% - it was just a short summary of what we learned that week and you had to create a social media post. Her exams were pretty straightforward, and were online which definetly helped. She also had quite a few exam questions that were identical to the practice exam questions she provided, which really helped to buffer exam grades. She also offered extra credit on all the exams with an optional bonus question - this really helped my grade. Overall I loved this class and Professor Wassum!