Hi, can anyone who has taken both these courses give me advice as to which is the better option?

thankyou

It ultimately depends on your interests, although I found positive psych easier and more interesting, even though there is no question bank. For abnormal, he tends to test on random statistics and I found it a chore to study for!

ok, i willl keep that in mind, thankyou

I was just wondering, how difficult did you find 3BA3 and 2AP3 in relation to psych 2B03?

thanks

i found both 3BA3 and 2AP3 easier than 2B03. but 3BA3 is probably the easiest because there is a lot less content, a lot of which is just review from 2B03 and it's very interesting too.

Psych 3B03 (Special Populations) is very similar to Psych 2AP3. The materials were practically identical, but the professors test differently. Dr. Hall teaches 3B03 and he is very easy, doesn't ask a lot of statistic questions like Dr. Day does. If you are interested in the material but want to do well, 10-12, I'd recommend 3B03.

I am taking positive right now so can't really comment on it yet. What I can say is that, many people assume that because Dr. Day has a test bank, you can do well. You have to understand the material in order to answer his questions, not simply just do them. If you're not good with remember statistics, go with positive.

For anyone who took Personality and liked it, I would not recommend positive psych. Personality was very conceptual and interesting. It looked a lot at theories and ideas. People often say that Positive psych is a continuation of personality. This isn't really the case, other than that you talk about maslow and rogers in both courses. Whereas personality is very conceptual, positive psych has more of the memorization of useless facts and figures that you may have seen in abnormal psych.

Positive Psych kind of feels like a super long and disorganized annotated bibliography for a paper with the thesis "Happiness is good and being a good person makes you happy". A large portion of the course is memorizing pages and pages of study results that that all seem pretty intuitive and similar (but the tests try to get to the subtle and meaningless differences between them). Rather than making a point and referring to the literature for support, this course kind of seems like unsummarized Pubmed search results for a bunch of different words like "gratitude" and "hope". I'm all for using using scientific literature as a basis for a course, but in Positive Psych the research is presented in an undigested manner and focus is more on the results of individual studies and not what you can take from the literature when you view it more meta-analytically.

Also, you aren't going to take a lot away from this course because a lot of what you learn are affirmations of things you already know about the topics. "Being happy is good, and being a good person makes you happy (or less unhappy)"

It really is a shame because positive psych is an interesting field when presented the right way (As you may have seen in the Humanist section of Personality psych). Dr. Day is a great teacher, but I think this course needs some serious retooling.