Let's do a wrap-up of Intro to Psy Research. Grading is based on weekly homeworks, quizzes, a group research project which consists of a paper, poster, and if chosen, a presentation, and the final (and attendance).
- Attendance and Quizzes
I only had one unexcused absence this semester. That is a vast improvement on my attendance from the bad days, and better even than last year. I'm proud of that. Especially since my classes began at 8am. I have had a terrible record when it comes to attendance for 8am classes, and that's now a thing of the past. My one missed class did happen to fall upon the day we had our first pop quiz, but we get to drop one, so it wasn't too bad.
- Paper
There's not much to say besides it being excellent. We had to turn it in at various stages, and our group paper received a 44/45 the first time, then a 72/75 the second time. We strove for perfects, but never expected it. We were there to learn after all and didn't know everything before taking the class. The final paper was submitted on Friday, and I expect to get a comparable score.
- Poster
As a group we put together a poster summarizing our project, and as a class, we had a poster conference where we'd present our posters to each other and we gave each other scores on originality, methods, and poster presentation. When it comes to crafts, I always insist on a clean look, using a knife/razor to cut paper rather than scissors, and I insisted on keeping everything the same, large font for easy reading. And of course we worked to make sure the content was as good as it could be as well. And at the end of the day, it all paid off, because we got chosen as one of the Top 5 groups to make a presentation of our full study to the whole class for extra credit points. (10-30 points possible. To keep that in perspective, the Final is 75 points, Quizzes were 20 points each totaling 100 points, and homeworks were 15 points each totaling 150 points. 30 points is a lot!)
- Presentation
I feel that our presentation was definitely the best of the 5 presentations. We had a nice flow, used actual slides rather than a shrunken down version of our poster, we had a study that was basic but well thought out, and we covered everything from what led to the development of the study to limitations and strengths. We took second place.
The group that won got to present on the second day, thereby having an advantage of seeing what the other people did, which is just how it was, but the unsatisfying part was that the winning group relied more on gimmicks and performance to get the class to rank them high, rather than actually presenting a study. But I couldn't completely fault the class, it was our TA that really taught us what a presentation was supposed to be like and how to think of them critically, while the teacher didn't even break down the scoring into three categories like she did on the poster grading sheets.
All in all though, the whole project was a great experience, and working in groups, creating a poster, and presenting in front of a class are all different experiences that I will be able to learn from and take with me going into pharmacy school.
- Homework and Final
So I've been doing excellent in attendance, quizzes, and everything related to the group project. Add that on top of the fact that we get to resubmit all our homeworks on the day of the final to be regraded for 80% of our missing points... well... my homework grade isn't as good as it could be. Adding on top of that, that I now have 25 points of extra credit... well... I can say that I've been tempted to be lazy and go into the final overconfident again. It can be seen as gaming the system, or as just knowing where to prioritize right. I'm getting an A regardless, and just as important, I knew I was learning the material.
Except I've been able to resist that this time. I do think that I don't need that much review, but I'll make sure that I do review the material. And I have already fixed two of the three homeworks that will get me a decent amount of points back. Getting an A should be no problem. Anything less than that would be shocking.
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