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 :)
