Reviews For Timi Barone

Dr. Barone knows a lot about Anthropology. My review may be slightly biased as I did not have much interest in the material. I found class usually boring, though ocassionally she made it interesting.

The class is structed as a lecture with Dr. Barone speaking the information to you while cycling through slides. The slides, while available on Blackboard, lack sufficient detail to use as a sole study source. Dr. Barone assigns readings from both the primary textbook and Anthropological books (one during each mid-term). She will go over review questions for the smaller books, and usually, at the end of each class, she will have a few questions for the class to answer (on clickers) to review the material covered that day.

For virtually the entire class, I kept on my laptop in the back of the room doing other things and only occassionally listening. I did not do well in the class except for a remarkable testing technique that Dr. Barone uses for the final. I'll talk about that in a bit.

Because some might find the course material boring, Dr. Barone likes to make it interesting. She can be quite funny, telling jokes and using humorous analogies to compare Anthropological concepts with more familiar things. She is usually quite happy but can be quite firm when cautioning against taking proper notes and proper attendance.

In my opinion, the class was difficult but I moderately enjoyed it for its simplicity (lack of student-led discussions, etc). I was not able to keep up with the readings very well, though reading the short books also assigned throughout the semester was really easy. I put off taking the online quizzes until quite late and as a result missed out on some review for the tests (four of them, plus a final). Some of the questions on the tests are pulled verbatim from the quizzes.

Fortunately for me, and I'm sure other students as well, Dr. Barone has an optional final at the end of the year that is composed of 50 questions, the size of all her other tests. What is unique about the final is that it is 50 questions that are pulled verbatim from the first four tests (200 questions in all). What I did at the end of the year was study the 200 questions from the first four tests repeatedly (about 5 or so times). Despite having read only about 20% of the text and not listening intently in class, my studying of the 200 test questions led me to get a 100% on the final and boosted my grade from a C or D to an A(-).

Aside from

Overall		Knowledge		Speech		Availability
Tangents		Homework		Exams		Grade Recieved	A
Class Taken Fall 2008

Dr. Barone is very animated and it is very hard to fall asleep in her class. The test aren't too hard. Most of the questions on the test are either quiz questions, clicker questions, or book questions.

Overall		Knowledge		Speech		Availability
Tangents		Homework		Exams		Grade Recieved	No Response
Class Taken Fall 2011