She is very clear in her lectures and her explanations are great, providing thorough examples alongside. For the midterm and final, make sure to review the lab material very thoroughly, including small details. I thought the midterm/final was a bit tricky, but Dr. Paquette-Smith gives you all the materials you need to succeed.

Melissa is such a gem. I really enjoyed this class. The information was mostly interesting. A lot of the grades were basically completion based and the tests were very straightforward if you studied. I studied pretty last minute for the midterm and final, and still managed to get an A+ in the class. This made me want to take more psych classes. Highly recommend!

Very straightforward class. I really enjoyed the professor's lectures. It was a bit difficult to pay attention for 2 hours, but it was a relatively simple class and was a good experience.

This class takes a lot of studying and all of her test questions are examples. EX. If this person can't remember the future what kind of Amnesia do they have? Questions like this so you must study while thinking of examples. Overall, she's a pretty good lecturer and will give you suggestions on how to study certain concepts.

This class wasn't too tough, but the final is cumulative which really messed me up. I didn't expect to get an A because of the final, but by the grace of God, I did. Pacquette-Smith is an OK professor, not a really fun class but the labs are easy to do and she provides a lot of help if you just ask her. She assigned a lot of leadership to one of the TAs, who is not very helpful and is kind of a know-it-all. For the final review, he provided information that was relevant to the other introductory to psychology class and not ours, so it wasn't really helpful. The midterm was ok, just a lot of memorization, but the final was a bit more rough.

This class was an amazing intro course into life at ucla. overall, this professor is engaging and helps make the course material related to daily tasks which makes it easier for lecture material to stick. I genuinely looked forward to coming to this class as it was not that hard to follow along. I would advise bringing some coffee or a sweater to lecture because it is a late afternoon class and the lecture hall we were in was freezing. She posts the slides either the day of lecture or the following day and has an additional outlines with study guide questions which were very helpful. There are also weekly lab reports, which are SUPER DUPER easy. The hard part for these lab reports is probably just remembering the names of the scientists/researchers lol, some of these lab reports are based on articles and others are from group projects. the projects are easy and they go over it in lecture.
This class is an easy A, I got a B (probably because I missed the midterm review session haha). She is a fair grader and rounds grades up. She also reaches out a lot via this thing called Piazza which is like a chat room for questions that students can post, she answers these fairly quickly (as in like she'll answer in 20 minutes or less)
be advised: she talks at a slower pace. this can either be a good thing if you type/write slow or this could be a bad thing if you have studied lecture material before hand

overall, will miss this class and would DEFINITELY recommend it

ps. you don't need the textbook, at least I didn't

Honestly this class is just okay. The professor is a great speaker, however the work load is somewhat heavy for a lower division course and the amount of information required to memorize for the final is completely unrealistic. No one I talked to in the course did well on the final. It would be nice if she offered some extra credit work or didn't make the final 40% of the grade as the class average on the final wasn't great. My lab partners and friends in the class had similar complaints about the course. If psych is your major, then P-S is probably a great professor to take this course with. However, if you are taking this class to gain some units or out of interest - it's not worth it.

I loved this class. I didn't do as well as I'd hoped because these tests were pretty challenging, but it was worth it. Professor Paquette-Smith is hilarious and super engaging. This is probably the only 2 hour lecture I'd be excited about going to. She was super welcoming and helpful in her office hours as well.
The textbook definitely isn't necessary because Professor doesn't test you on anything that's in it. However, it may be helpful as the tests are very focused on applying the concepts you learned in the class rather than memorization. I spent weeks trying to memorize the terms and that wasn't good enough. Take your quizzes multiple times to practice because those are the type of questions that will be on the exams. Everything else is pretty easy.

This class was interesting but two whole hours for lecturing seemed a bit much. However, the professor was very clear and precise on her slides. The midterm and final was fairly simple, I just memorized most of the lecture outlines (she provides them and they're super useful)! The extra lab and article analyses might overwhelm you, but they were graded fairly and had to do with concepts from lectures. Honestly, most straightforward professor I've taken so far!

The class in general is interesting. I didn't do as well as I thought I would because the exams given in the course are very challenging. The exams are challenging just because you are required to memorize a whole lot of information from her slides so if your taking her class, make sure you pay attention to her lectures! The textbook isn't necessary at all, nothing in the book will be on her exams. Overall though it's an interesting class, but it's a lot of work in my opinion for a GE lower division class.