Professor Smyth was a fantastic professor. He is passionate about the subject, and manages to make the class very interesting. If you keep up with the reading and study it, the PowerPoints, and videos for tests you will receive a decent grade. You also have to keep up with the readings if you want to get a good clicker score, which is also entirely feasible if you read the textbook. If you don't want to read or you don't have strong self-motivation, this isn't the class for you. Great material, great professor, hard work.

This class was impossible to grasp. Smyth was incredibly unclear about things we should focus on and made it such that tests covered obscure textbook details and everything he highlighted in lecture. It got progressively more boring as the semester went on and he was very un accommodating about clicker points when I was incredibly sick for two classes.

Basically with his class it is a hit or miss. If you enjoy reading textbooks and find psych to be a fascinating topic then by all means take this course because he is the head of the psych department. However, if you are looking for an easy A, it is not this class. E-School for the love of God do yourself a favor and don't take this class... you have it hard enough as it is. Overall, I enjoyed the class and had fun with the professors lectures, but for the sake of my GPA probably wouldn't have taken it if I had the change to redo my class schedule.

Hard class but helpful and clear professor—really knows how to teach and make PPTs!

This class is all about reading. Keep up with the assigned text and you will do fine.. If you cannot do the reading then I would not suggest taking this class. Smyth can be dry at times but overall he really cares about the students. He asks clicker questions in class for accuracy, based on the assigned reading and 95% of the tests are made up from the book. READ

Professor Smyth is superb. He is a wonderful lecture who blends information with humor seamlessly. There is a decent amount of reading, but not much of the material is actually difficult (except for memorizing terms), and though it isn't necessarily required, it helps tremendously if you want to do well on the tests, which can be pretty difficult. The multiple choice section is usually extremely easy, but the short answer portion is very tough as it requires you to remember very specific vocab. He does drop the lowest test grade and the tests are curved, however, so it isn't hard to do well in the class. Very highly recommended. Well worth the work you put into it.

Not an easy A but very doable. Reading is very dense, you need to be able to handle a lot of information in this class. Biggest tip for this class is to use the section reviews and margin questions when studying.

The course covers a very broad range of topics and there are many concepts/definitions to memorize for exams. Readings are about 40 pages in length each week. That being said, Smyth makes the class fun, enjoyable, and very doable, even at 9:30AM. Exams have huge curves and there are clicker questions every class for extra credit points. Take notes and thoroughly read the text when it's assigned and the class shouldn't be an issue.

Do not take this class unless you're a psyc major-- not an easy A! TOO much reading, and the material is really dry. It's also pretty science-y at parts, so if you're like me and wanted an easy, interesting class to fill in some of those gen-ed requirements, don't take this course.

This class is very straight-forward. Read 40(sometimes 80 but rare) per week and attend the lectures for extra credit. The tests are just pure memorization, but there are usually massive curves on them, which accounts for the big A+ distribution on the graph. The discipline of psychology is pretty interesting, and you get an easy grade for taking the class. I highly recommend it. Test curves + extra credit + psychology make for a good course.