skoolblues

RLG - Religion Courses

RLG100 and RLG280 – World Religions
David Perley

Marking Scheme: 3 Quizzes (11% each), 2 Essays (11% each), Tutorial Participation (5%), Class Participation (5%), Final Exam (35%)

This course can easily be counted as a bird course if you can memorize lots of things. The Prof is a bit boring because most of the content required for the course is already in the textbook. So the Prof just regurgitates and expands on concepts we have read in the book. The religions studied in this course are: Indigenous Religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism.

Why could this be considered a bird course? All of the three quizzes require you to define 10 terms and answer 2 short-answer questions. If you are good at memorizing, you can memorize the list of terms from the Quiz Study file that the Prof posts online. For the short-answer questions, the Prof and the TAs usually give hints, or suggestions, about what types of questions to expect. There are 4 short-answer questions given, out of which 2 must be answered. So quizzes are 33% in total, and they are easy to ace as long as you can memorize and do some ‘analysis’ for the short-answer questions (I would expect most people in university to do more than memorization, analysis is not too hard).
Also, for the final exam, you have to define 10 terms. These terms are worth 50 marks (hence 50% of the whole exam), and if you can define these well, you can at-least pass the exam.

Workload/Essays: this course has mandatory weekly readings, meaning that before you attend a lecture you must read the book to get an idea what the Prof is going to talk about. The essays can be challenging but students have a variety of topics to choose from. For Essay 1 you can re-submit the essay if you think you deserve a better mark for that essay, and the TA will give you a higher mark if he/she checks that you have made the necessary changes and improved the essay.
Final Exam: the final exam is cumulative. You have to memorize a long list of terms, and out of the 100 terms you memorize, only 10 out of the 13 given on the exam have to be answered. There will be 4 short-answer questions given, out of which 2 must be answered. These are inter-traditional questions (for example, compare the Sunni-Shiite split in Islam with the Protestant Reformation in Christianity). There is one long-essay question, which is not marked by the TA, but by the Prof himself. This question requires you to discuss various religions and their doctrines (for example, discuss the role of scripture in world religions).

Overall course enjoyment: the lectures are pretty interesting. We don’t simply learn about a religion and go home; there are class discussions in which we discuss various topics such as spirituality, mysticism, authority of religion, how religions developed, what is a ‘religion’, and social issues. The tutorials are sort of okay, but I would recommend everyone to have a good relationship with the TA. The TAs are experienced men/women, who usually give you good hints and suggestions about what to expect on the quizzes and the exam. This course has a discussion board on portal and this is extremely helpful. Sometimes students post review files for quizzes and you can also ask people for lecture notes if you missed a class.
Rating: 4/5