Reviews of professor Rachel Penton

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Dr. Penton is a great lecturer for this class, even if it was all online. She'll give you video lectures and in-person ones so that you can afford to miss a lecture or two. You have to read a fair amount and the exam questions are rather difficult, but if you study and put the time into it, you'll be fine. Focus on learning targets.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
LOTS of busy work but entirely online/asynch. A lot of the busy/group work is really pointless to the learning process but good in terms of grades because the exams were pretty hard and application based (covered a lot of material too). There's a lot of extra credit too. I think you can get at least 10 pts EC throughout the semester.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 2.0/5
Lots of busy work but very doable. Daily quizzes, polls, group project, and 3 write ups. 3 midterms were 10% each and final was 20%. If you get 100s in all the non-test categories and do all the extra credit, you only need to average an 85 on the exams to end with an A. Also Dr. Penton really grew on me throughout the semester. Overall, good intro!

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Overall the class was just way too much work, the final group project was 110 pages, graded question by question for correctness. Dr. Penton was accommodating in some aspects but unreasonably rigid in others. Lectures and hw were disorganized. Also, she needs to stop forcing group work on students, it just made everyone miserable.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
People complain that Dr. Penton is a difficult professor: she kept me on track! I needed motivation to read and prepare for the complex subject that is neuroscience, and the low-stakes homework quizzes with unlimited attempts held me accountable. The CREATE method project was helpful in my work as a research intern. Work hard, and you'll get an A.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
She's pretty funny. I didn't like her TAs all that much but that's not really her fault. Overall a pretty average professor, but that's good because there wasn't really much to complain about. The textbook is awful because there's not a lot of useful information in like 2 long pages of reading, it's like trying to find needles in a hay stack.