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Tuesday 21 June 2011

Easy peasy...

Something interesting that I've found over this semester...

As I believe I've mentioned once or twice, I've taken a Psychology elective. In it, there's not a heck of a lot of work required. One 2000 word essay, and one 120 question multiple choice exam. And some research participation. Psychology, as an aside, is something I've known a bit about from here and there for awhile, so a lot of what we did I knew a bit of.

The essay we did was basically this question: should western practices be used in non-western environments? (That is, in regards to mental/psychological health.) That wasn't the exact question, but that's the gist of it. I found it really interesting to research, and not too difficult to write. I recently got my mark back for it. I got 93%. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised. I thought I had done well, but not that well. Then I checked in with a friend of mine who was also doing the elective (and had done Psychology before, as a matter of fact) and he hadn't done so well. And he was a bit annoyed, because he felt he'd put a fair bit of work into it. I felt slightly guilty, because I know I didn't put that much work into mine.

The exam was two hours, so one minute per question. Multiple choice had always been something I was good at. I used to get heaps of these, it was my bread and butter, pretty much. I didn't do much study for it. I read (well, skimmed)  through a couple of the chapters, and read (ish) the lecture slides. That was either the night before or on the day. I found it pretty easy, finished in exactly half the time. Again, my friend who does it found it fairly hard, and he studied a fair bit for it.

One of the resources we have access to is called MyPsychLab, which is basically just something that helps you study. Gives you example questions, that sort of thing. Another thing we have is PASS classes, run by former (or sometimes third year) uni students, who basically just help us out with whatever. I didn't use either of these at all.

Added to this, there were many people frequently complaining on the forums about the difficulty of the essay, research participation availability (which was pretty bad, but if you checked it often enough you were fine) and the exam. Many of these people were using Mypsychlab, possibly the PASS classes as well. I was using neither, found it easy.

Don't get it. Do I just find this stuff easy to understand? Do I have a good general knowledge of it or something, does my brain just click the right way? Or is everybody else just having a rough time? :P I dunno.

2 comments:

  1. I had exactly the same thing in Literature! There were third year students who didn't seem to grasp the concepts as easy as I did. I think it comes from a few things:

    1. The more you exercise your brain, the better it is at dealing with new ideas.
    2. A good general knowledge makes it easy to relate many different things.
    3. Some people have an interest in things, but haven't spent as much time exploring it.
    4. If you've not considered psychology as a serious career, you can bring a different perspective to it. And in essays, if you're original you get much better marks.

    Anyway, those are my thoughts. I personally found Literature to be quite easy in the end (polished off the 2000 word essay over one weekend), but there was a lady in it who couldn't get the idea of allegory. Go figure. You probably just have a natural aptitude and a good deal of interest towards your subject :D

    PS: Are you continuing psychology next semester, or looking at a different elective?

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  2. Haha. Think you might be right. I'm planning to do psychology again, yes. Should be interesting.

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