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I took this course in Fall 2014 with Dr. Day, and I agree with everything the first review said. It was one of my favourite courses, very interesting content. Dr. Day is a very good lecturer, he knows his stuff extremely well. You learn about what personality is, and all the various theories of personality. The first section of the course focuses on what personality is, a general overview of the theories of personality (which you will go over in detail throughout the course), and on theories of Freud and theories of Jung. The second section of the course focuses on humanistic theories by Rogers, Maslow and Social Learning Theory by Bandura and Mischel. The second part of the course was more difficult in my opinion, it seems simple, but you really need to understand the small differences between all the humanistic theories because they all seem like they are talking about the same thing. The final part of the course dealt with biological bases of personality, Eysneck's theories and trait & type theories. This part of the course was very interesting to me, even the textbook readings were pretty interesting to read.
Two midterms (40MC) are worth 30% each and non-cumulative, and a 40% cumulative exam (80 MC). 45% of the exam is based on old material, and 55% of the exam focuses on the last section of the course you weren't tested on yet. Tests consist of 30-32 MC on lecture material alone, and the other 8-10 MC come from material in the textbook. The exam also had 8-10 MC on the textbook. The average for the course was around 70%.
This course is very similar to Psych 1X03 in terms of testing style. Dr. Day provides a quiz bank to help you with lecture material, and it was very helpful. Many quiz bank questions are repeated or slightly modified by one word, so it's important to not memorize the quiz bank questions, but understand why each option is right and why options are wrong as well, because a modification of one word can make a wrong answer right or a right answer wrong.
Dr. Day also provides a courseware that is very helpful, all his lecture notes are in there, so class is a time where you can just listen and try to absorb the material without scrambling to write down what he says. All lectures are podcasted. Lecture material is not very heavy, if you go to class, you will know the basics of the material. For tests, I recommend reading over the courseware and lecture notes, and then doing the quiz bank. If you do well on the quiz bank, you will do well on the midterm. Questions can be tricky if you do not know your material because he does modify questions and there are many A, B, and C, none of the above, more than one of the above options.
Also 20% of the midterms are based on textbook readings. The textbook is not a hard read, I actually enjoyed some of the readings. These textbook readings are separate from lecture material, he may only touch the surface of what is presented in these readings. The readings are about 80-100 pages for the midterm, and about 150 pages for the exam. The questions he asks on textbook readings can be very random, it can be one line in the textbook but if you go through your notes on the readings really well at least once or twice, you will be good for the majority of the textbook questions. The readings are non-cumulative on the final exam which is good. Most people find lecture material easier to study for and it is 80% of the midterm, so after mastering the lecture material, I would recommend reading over your text notes once or twice. Sometimes I would study a lot for textbook readings and not do that well on those questions and other times, I would just skim my notes once or twice and still end up doing well on those questions.
It's important to know that memorizing the quiz bank answers will do no good. You have to understand why options are correct or incorrect, because he will change them on the midterms and exam. The questions you get wrong, it's good to look over that section in the courseware and understand why you got the question wrong. Sometimes, you might get a question wrong because of one word in the question, so it's important to catch these and know the logic behind the right answer. In essence, it's a lot like Psych 1X03 quiz questions. I liked doing the quizbank in one section at a time, so you know that you've mastered one section, then you can go to the next section.
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