Q16. What were the most beneficial aspects of this course? (Please be specific.)
Learning how to study massive amounts of meaningless arbitrary information for exams that cover 10% of the material I studied for weeks in advance to be prepared for.

Q17. What specific, practical changes can you recommend that might improve this course?
Telling us SPECIFICALLY what the hell to study.  I do not enjoy nervous breakdowns because I've studied for a freakin week and still do not know what I should be studying.
Giving us homework to apply our learning to so it isn't so grueling trying to understand a bunch of random people's methodologies and whatnot.
Shorter exams.
Attendance requirements and having the notes online so it is easier to just focus on the lecture and read the notes later that day.
Rationally explaining how herding us into the lecture room like we are cattle makes test taking easier.  You end up handing out the exam late anyway, so what is the point?  Students don't even finish piling into the room until 10 minutes into the exam which means that you either need to let people in earlier or devise a better method of conducting tests.  Maybe conducting them like normal professors do would work more efficiently?

Q18. Which readings did you learn the most from? Least?
I wouldn't be able to tell you because most of the time I care more about trying to actually be prepared for your ridiculous exams than the actual material itself.

Q19. Other comments regarding lectures, discussions, intellectual stimulation, instructor's relationship to students, test, assignments, grading, what the course meant to you and so forth.
I feel as if the instructor's expectations for a GENERAL (read: PSYCHOLOGY 101 COURSE) are absolutely ridiculous and are completely unfair.  I have never ever studied for a test weeks in advance and gotten a mediocre grade.  I have made outlines, I have made notecards, and I have reread everything from the slides to the textbook in preparation for these exams and I have done horribly on 2/3rds of them.  For a class with the only graded portions being exams, you'd think the professor would be trying to help the students succeed as much as possible by giving them as much information as they can about the exams so they can adequately prepare for them.  Instead of telling us what the hell to study in the hundreds of pages covered on the exam, I am left with vague instructions on what to study, leaving me stressed about studying every single god damn detail in those pages.  Given the massive amount of material within those pages, I am forced to ignore minor details to better study everything else.  Smaller amounts of material to study make it easier to learn and commit those things to memory.

I do not appreciate studying key concepts and terminology only to find out that I lost points for not knowing what process was devised by Atkinson-Schiffrin even though if you had asked me what the three stages of memory processing were I would have been able to describe them to you in the exact detail they were described in the book.  Aren't the concepts more important than the meaningless and arbitrary names behind them?  Or are you just trying to find ways to make my test grade even lower?

But lets be real here, this is a 101 course, I understand it's general psychology and we are covering a lot of stuff.  Frankly, lecturing about very broad topics and expecting us all to know every last detail for a short exam is absurd and unreasonable.  Cut the bullshit on your slides to match your exams or cut the exams down and make those into quizzes or homework so we can actually come out of this class having learned something other than masochistic ways of studying or maybe having a grade higher than a C.  Take the time to help your students succeed if you are going to force us to study the ridiculously massive amounts of terminology, concepts, and people in general psychology.  Give us homework so we can apply what we learned in class and from the textbook and make it easier for us to study.  Put study guides on blackboard so we can study specific things and do better in your course.

But you don't give us any of these things like a normal professor does.  Instead you give us vague 'study questions' that ignore the tons of detail you force us to commit to memory (and then you turn around and put questions on the exams about the details that weren't covered on the 'study questions').  You give us slides to 'fill in the information while we engage in intellectual discussion' in class but what's the difference?  It's still tons of information that maybe 25% of will be on the exam.  And that's where your course fails miserably: helping your students succeed.  Honestly, from the way you grade/operate this course, the only thing I see in you is that you don't care about your students.  Do you honestly think it's fair covering such a broad amount of material without giving us ways to study for it?  Do not sit there and tell yourself "WELL YOU HAVE WEEKS TO PREPARE AND YOU HAVE NO HOMEWORK IN THIS COURSE" because that is a complete cop out.  Saying that this material is not to be crammed is implying that I should take tons of time to prepare for your exams.  Well guess what, I'm a student with several other courses to study for and it is unfair that you have given us no other way besides studying every single excrutiating detail covered in the chapters in order to succeed.

In the end, what have I learned from this class?  Absolutely nothing.  You want to know why?  Because with the way you structure this course, instead of looking at the material thinking "This is interesting!", I just think about how horrible it is going to be studying it for the next exam.  You should be ashamed of yourself for your absurd expectations of your students.  And you know what?  I'm glad I changed my mind about majoring in psychology because if this was my first impression of it I would have immediately changed my major and never looked back.  Thank you for killing any interest I had left in psychology Professor Gallo.