Quarter Taken:
Fall 2020
COVID-19
This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Submitted Dec. 24, 2020
Grade Received:
B
Pros:
Professors are clearly passionate and knowledgeable about the material. They go into plenty of detail and are willing to answer questions if you have any.
There is a sense of community that you get with a cluster that you don't have in other classes - there's "community events" outside of class like watching a movie or going to a game night. In a normal year a cluster like this would be a great way to make friends as a freshman.
The discussions are helpful to review the material, we did plenty of kahoots and review games that were useful.
Cons:
The material is difficult, and a lot of it wasn't what I signed up for. There's enough extremely detailed anatomy to make anyone who's not a science person cry - I'm a STEM major and it was still too much for me at times. All the -encephalons will show up in my nightmares for years to come.
The writing assignments. Hooooooo boy, these were bad. The prompts were very convoluted and confusing (the prompt and Q&A for the final paper was eight pages long, lol) and the grading is very inconsistent. When your "feedback" is a comment about a sentence and saying that "this claim is not supported" when the next two lines do nothing but support that claim, your boy is gonna be a little salty.
The course doesn't do very well in an online format. The website was extremely unorganized, and everyone was constantly dealing with bugs all year. Not to mention that the sense of community that clusters try to bring is basically gone in an online format. Going to a movie night on campus with friends is a lot different then joining a zoom call with your mic and camera off and watching the movie, lol.
So, should you take this class? If you are very interested in neuroscience and willing to put in a lot of work, and assuming we'll be back in person next year, go for it. Though if you do, going to the library office hours before papers are due is an absolute must (so you can understand what's actually being graded and whether citations are important or not), and study a bunch before all of the quizzes and tests. There aren't many free points in the class, so it can mess up your GPA if you don't treat it as your top priority (which I couldn't, taking two other major classes at the same time). Considering GEs are supposed to be easier GPA boosters compared to your major classes, that's quite a big drawback.