Hi everyone, today let me show you through another university exam but this
time on the topic of psychology. I have here with me a introductory psychology
exam from MIT and I'll go through the paper and have a little look at what the
format of questions is and what kind of topics they're asking you about.
You might find this interesting if you're considering studying psychology or you
even want to see what you might be missing out on. MIT make a lot of their
course materials available online so I'll put a link in the description to
this exam as well as a lot of the other notes and lectures for this course.
You might be surprised and think that this exam actually appears a little bit easy
especially considering it comes from MIT but keep in mind that this is an
introductory course and I think that there are only so many ways that you can
teach and examine the fundamentals of a topic and maybe the difference between
universities comes in more as you get into the later stages and need more
advanced concepts in the topic but I think this course is designed to give
students at MIT their first introduction to the topic it's probably the first
psychology course that they're taking and they themselves want to see if they
would make a good psychology major. So let's have a look at it.
The exam tells
us that the questions are all from lectures and from readings from an
Oliver Sacks book that book is called The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
and is a bunch of case studies written by a neurologist. This exam is one of
three exams for the course spread throughout the semester with each
exam worth 20% of the final grade so this exam doesn't cover everything but
it does cover brain structure and function, methods of research, vision,
consciousness, attention, memory and learning. So let's have a look at this
question for example, "At what point in the human visual system are neurons or
axons that code for the same visual field from the two different eyes first
brought together anatomically?" the answer I've circled is optic chiasm.
Going on we're being asked about the results of the brain imaging study
between men and women, we're asked about the major visual cortical pathways and a
few facts about things like memory and recognition. For example here's an easy
one "We read about" well it says 12 letters at a time as the answer.
It's kind of a case of remembering the details, much of this is really going to
be a bit of a memory test. If you haven't remembered something, because it's
multiple choice you might be able to deduce your way to an answer through
some kind of logic. Maybe let's look at 17, "Negative contrast refers to the
finding that rat performance in a maze is worst at the end of the experiment
for rats who" the answer is "initially receive a large reward and then are
switched to a small reward". Maybe that makes sense even if you haven't read
that particular passage in the notes but only a casual interest in psychology
isn't going to get you a high score here a lot of these things involve jargon and
concepts that you really need to have done quite a lot of study to know.
"When you watch dogs play in the park or watch how your professors conduct their
classes you are engaging in a form of what"
well it's naturalistic observation. This course say is that it's designed to
introduce you to the scientific study of human nature so we also have some
questions that make sure we know about things like the scientific method and
how psychology research would be conducted we're asked here "You can use
what to eliminate experimenter expectancy effects?" so that's obviously
something to do with experiment design the answer is D a double-blind design.
Exams like this for a course where there would be a lot of students taking it are
not really designed to be extremely challenging they're more designed I
think to kind of make sure you've been paying attention, that you've done all
the readings that you are supposed to do and that you know what all of the key
concepts are in the course. We get down to quite a funny question here number 38
it says "Take a look at the following figure if you close your left eye and
focus on the X while slowly moving the paper
away from your face what will happen and why?" I kind of find this a funny question
to have in an exam because what you're going to have is hundreds of students
sitting there with the paper in front of them holding it up to their face and
moving it slowly away. It will probably be quite a funny sight for the examiners.
Well the answer here was B "the picture will disappear when it lands on the part
of your eye where ganglion cell axons come together to form the optic nerve
because there are no photoreceptors there." Question 42 references a
particular study from the textbook "Garcia and colleagues discovered taste
aversion and rats because" A "the taste of water and plastic bottles was associated
with sickness from radiation." That seems like an interesting study to read about.
I took one introductory psych course of my own during undergrad and I'd say it's
pretty consistent with the kind of questions that were being asked here.
This particular exam that I'm showing you is from 2011 though so some of the
topics could be slightly outdated although it should be pretty much
representative of what you'd see in a first psychology course. After the
multiple choice questions we get on to some short answer questions where I
guess you pretty much just need to fill in the blanks or give some small written
answers to the questions like "listing the four lobes of the brain and for each
lobe list one of their functions". "Give an example of each of the following
positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment,
negative punishment". Hopefully that provided a little bit of
insight for you into what it would be like to be in this class but obviously
it's gonna be a bit strange looking just from the outside you really need to be
involved in all of this reading. Reading the books, the textbooks and looking at
the lecture notes before you'll probably really be able to do well at this and
check out the link in the description to the course if you want to maybe learn
some of it for yourself. So thank you for watching and I'll see you next time :)