PSYC 3410

This class was one of the most interesting and worthwhile classes I've taken at UVA. You'll find yourself diagnosing your friends

Professor Coan is the best! He makes you want to come to the lectures. Keep up with the reading and pay attention in class and you’ll be fine.

great class

Really great and interesting class. Professor Coan makes the topic easy to understand and if you do the reading you will do fine on the exams. Definitely recommend to all students, psych majors or not!

James Coan is the MAN. He's hilarious, albeit awkward when you first meet him. He also really knows his stuff and made almost every lecture enjoyable, whether it was through an article, some NPR, or YouTube. I loved his class, and I would tell anyone who had a chance to take it to do so.

Prof. Coan's a nice guy who loves laughing at himself, but the material itself is kind of dry, and he tends to read off the slides. I was a little disappointed because the previous reviews made this class sound like a must-take, but I honestly found it mediocre.

Like the other poster from Fall 2010 said, I expected to be blown away by this class, but those expectations were overly high. However, I won't go as far as to say it was 'mediocre'- in fact, it was very interesting and mostly enjoyable. Some days are less bearable than the others (usually when there's a lengthy, wordy powerpoint to go through). The specific format of going through each type of disorder gets old and predictable, but it's really the only way to go about it. His stories are great at breaking up sometimes-dry lectures and he clearly has a ton of experience. Coan does well to get opinions of students in (usually successful) attempts to start a discussion about the topic, which is commendable for a large lecture-style class. I can imagine working in his lab would be a blast, even if it's very serious research that's being done. Definitely an easygoing dude who cares about teaching as much as research

Coan was enjoyable, but I wasn't completely sold on the class. Anecdotes from his personal life were always enjoyable to listen to, but the actual material was somewhat dry and formulaic--learn about the disorder, identify symptoms, learn about causes, etc. and then you do that for every disorder. His tests get very specific.

By far the greatest class I've taken. Great professor with a lot of very interesting stories. Very worthwhile.

This class is really interesting and Prof. Coan is really nice and funny and very laid back and down to earth. He is basically that professor that doesn't look like a professor when you first see him. The material is challenging and there are a lot of percentages and symptoms and such but he definitely tries to make it fun. I would recommend this class for anyone with an interesting in Abnormal Psych. The tests are straightforward like all the Psych classes in the dept. So read the material and go to lecture!