Reflections on Psyc 406

An appreciation for the blogging assignment and test project

As a fourth year psychology major with a behavioural science minor, I have taken numerous psychology courses over my years at McGill and I’ve always found it kind of surprising that the majority of these courses consist simply of one (or two) midterm (s) and one final, all multiple choice. I understand that with hundreds of students in a class that Scantron exams are the most effective way to test our understanding of the material, but I’ve always been a bit frustrated at the lack of opportunities for more qualitative work. Multiple choice tests rarely allow the student to actively engage with the material or apply it in a “real-world” situation, which is a valuable and important skill especially if a student is hoping to go into a research career. That’s why I really enjoyed how the Psyc 406 evaluations are set up. There are still multiple choice exams, but there are opportunities for students to demonstrate their knowledge and engage in the curriculum in other ways in case multiple choice tests are not necessarily their favorite form of evaluation.

I was hesitant about these blogging posts at first because I was intimidated by the lack of structure. I wasn’t used to it all, especially in psychology courses. But as I wrote them, I enjoyed being able to explain what I thought and felt about what we were learning and apply it to other things in the world, which is something that other courses rarely accommodate for. And the test project not only makes it abundantly clear how what we were taught in this course can be applied, but it allows us to create a test on our own that we can potentially use in the future. That is huge. As someone who is considering a career in psychology research, I can easily say that this course is the one that I think has most prepared me for graduate school. Being prompted to go above and beyond the course material with the blog posts helped me realize all the ways that what I was learning could be connected to life and events around me. The process of the test project helped me to experience first-hand the designing of a test (or experiment), how to execute it, and how to analyze and interpret the results that I received. Essentially, even though I was nervous about how to write these blog posts and intimidated about how I could possibly create my own psychological test, I am so glad that they were a part of this course because they gave me knowledge and experience that I didn’t even know that I was missing out on. I know that this is the first time that the professor has tried the blogging posts with a class so I just wanted to highly recommend that this assignment be included in future semesters of Psyc 406. Cheers to you, Professor Stotland.