Psych W1001y 3 pts. Spring 1999

Professor: Norma Graham, nvg@psych.columbia.edu,

Textbook. PSYCHOLOGY (3rd ed) by Peter Gray (who was an undergraduate at Columbia). Worth Publishers, New York, 1999. Available at the Columbia bookstore. There will be about 50-70 pages assigned per week. See the reading list (handout 4).

Supplementary readings will be suggested (see handout 4), but they will not usually be required. (Some are the sources for lecture material that is not in the textbook.) If any supplementary readings are required, they will be on reserve in the P sychology Library, 4th floor, Schermerhorn.

A study guide is available for this textbook. The study guide is not required reading but some students find it useful.

Handouts. There will be many handouts in this class. They are required reading. You would be well advised to keep them together in a notebook or folder.

The lectures will not cover all the assigned material from the book. Similarly, the book does not cover all the material in the lectures. The class periods will often include demonstrations, sometimes in the form of movies or videot apes when the material is not suitable for live demonstrations. Your attendance at lectures will be assumed by the exams. There may even be occasional test questions that depend on your knowing how a particular demonstration turned out in this class thi s year. (This kind of question happens because it is very difficult to write test questions at all. And attendance at a class is supposed to be something instructors can assume. Note: if you understand the point of the demonstration it is usually diff icult NOT to remember how the demonstration turned out in class.)

Particularly complicated material that was presented visually in class will be xeroxed and handed out to everyone.

I started something several years ago which many students liked so I will continue this year: namely, daily "quizzes" which don't count in your grade but will give you examples of the kinds of questions that appear on the exams. Further, they provide evidence of attendance that may help your grade if you fall on a borderline.

If you miss a lecture, please get notes and announcements from a classmate and xerox any handouts you missed. (We will try to keep a copy of the handouts on reserve in the library.) Remember that students have a responsibility to attend class. (We ar e happy to help in cases of serious sickness or emergency.)

There will be two in-class exams. The first (in class about half-way through the semester) will cover the first half of the course, and the second (on the last day of class) will cover the second half. The exams will consist of multiple-choice questions and other questions that take a relatively short time to answer (including the interpretation and drawing/labeling of graphs and diagrams as well as some mathematical/statistical problems and/or very short essays). O n each exam about half the points will come from the book (generally from a professionally-provided test file of questions) and about half from the lecture (made up by the teaching assistants and myself). Of course, some material will have been in both b ook and lecture and so will have twice the probability of being on the exam. The median on these exams has typically been about 70% correct.

Make-up exams will be given only in exceptional cases; they will probably consist of an objective and an essay part, and sometimes a penalty will be imposed on the grade. Any such make-up exam (either for the first or second objective exam) will be given at the time for which the registrar officially schedules a final exam for this course (which is currently listed as Tues, May 11 from 1-4 pm).

You will have seen examples of test questions from previous years on the daily quizzes. A warning: for some of you, some of the exam questions may seem to be at a quite detailed level e.g. the conditions of an experiment, an assumption of a particul ar theory. However, if you have really learned and understood the implications of (as opposed to just "read" or "listened to" or "understood at a superficial level") the important material from this course, you will almost certainly have picked up many of those details. At least you will remember the details for the time being. Somewhat paradoxically, test questions about details are frequently a more valid indicator of knowledge about the generalities than test questions attempting to get at th e generalities. Furthermore, many of the "details" are actually useful facts in their own right. However, the best way to study in general (even if test grades were the only thing you cared about in this course) is not to try to memorize details. Rather you should try actively to form a coherent story in your mind, a framework into which the details fit. One of the best ways to do this is to ask yourself questions constantly -- don't just accept each sentence as it goes by. Then the "story" in your mind will be one annotated with questions, some of which are answered and some not. The process of asking questions is one of the best ways of learning and thinking. Further, asking questions is a very important function of educated and responsib le persons. (Some memorization, e.g. of a few technical terms, may be useful particularly when beginning a new unit. See the first reading assignment for more about studying.)

There will be two written assignments during the semester. These will depend on material from the lectures and from the assigned readings. Non-verbal (e.g. figures showing data, diagrams, data analysis) as well as ve rbal work (writing) will be required. You will have about two weeks to complete each of these assignments. They will be due in the middle and end of semesters.

Late written assignments will be accepted only in exceptional cases, and in most of those cases a penalty will be imposed on the grade.

A separate sheet to be handed out later will describe this research-participation requirement in more detail. Briefly, you will be expected to participate in several hours of psychology experiments during the semester. You will have a choice of whatever experiments currently need subjects (e.g. memory experiments, vision experiments, language experiments, personality experiments). Attendance at these experiments will be treated the same way attendance at lectures is. That is, you are expected to participate in experiments, and an account of how many experiments you participated in will be kept, but it will only directly affect your grade if your grade is on the borderline. Indirectly, however, the experiment s may provide material for a written assignment. Thus please keep the de-briefing sheets that you receive after each experiment because they may be useful for the written assignment.

** Friday April 16th will be the last date on which you can participate.

Each of the two in-class exams will count 300 points toward your final grade. Each of the two out-of-class written assignments will count 150 points. They total 300+300+150+150=900 points

The final letter grades in this class will be assigned "on a curve". Approximately 33% of the class will receive A's (A+, A, or A-), approximately 45% of the class will receive B's (B+, B, or B-), and the rest will receive lower grades. I have been using this distribution since the mid 1980s -- it was the distribution of grades in 1000-level courses at Columbia and Barnard in the mid-1980 Student Course Guides. Recent studies of grading practices at Columbia show that this is like the curren t natural sciences gradiing distribution. It is lower than the current humanities distribution. If, on the basis of my accumulated experience with this course, I could see that this class was learning more than usual (or less), I would bias the distrib ution accordingly. I know of no totally reasonable and fair way to grade. This is one attempt.

As I hope you know and assume: Cheating will not be tolerated. And I hope none occurs. Any suspected cheating will be reported to the relevant deans. Cheaters usually feel there is some special circumstance that gives them a right to cheat on this occasion. If you feel that way, you are almost certainly fooling yourself. Cheating is unfair to the rest of us, and just makes life more difficult and less rewarding for all.