First look at the syllabus especially the teacher's title. Intro classes that are also commonly taken by out of major students tend to follow pretty strict departmental guidelines and/or be taught by people who are pretty low on the academic totem pole. Thus there is good chance that the teacher won't be able shoehorn too much of their pet projects in. Before I go one can I ask about how large the class is? -edit I was going to customize it a bit based on the class format, but was intending to say more or less what Unnamed did, minus the personal anecdotes. I was also going to add that if the teacher is completely horrible you might be able to transfer to another section. On a final note you might want to look into pragmatism and late Wittgenstein. From what I've seen they aren't up to the standard of the sequences, but do provide a high status/low inferential distance (to philosophers) way of pointing out some of the most common ways people misuse words.

See what you can learn. Try to steel-man the arguments that you encounter. If you're faced with bad arguments then three things that you can focus on (in declining order of priority) are: 1) what good points are in the neighborhood of this argument, 2) what is the central flaw of this argument (which gets at its core), and 3) why would someone find this argument plausible? #3 is especially useful if it can lead you back towards 1 & 2. In most philosophy classes, you can get a good grade if you make clear arguments, and clearly lay out the arguments that you disagree with before expressing your reasons for disagreement. So it's probably worth at least giving that a try (especially if you have opportunities to try it out early in the class that won't have much effect on your final grade). If it doesn't go smoothly, before jumping to the mind-numbing "guess the password" solution, try looking at it as a problem of inferential distance. Are there ways of getting your points across more clearly based on how you frame your argument, what background information you give, which claims you leave out of your argument (because they are inessential and too many inferential steps away), etc.? I took several philosophy-related classes (in a few different departments), and only had one where I had to do something like guessing the teacher's password. In that class the professor was a postmodernist type, who designed the course as a way to explain his worldview and assigned papers for us to write that had to follow a template that fit within his worldview. On the whole that class was a good experience. I didn't have to worry much about password-guessing except when writing those papers; in class I was sincere & engaged and focused on inferential distance (including trying to point out flaws in his reasoning in class discussion in a way that was concise, catchy to other students, and non-annoying). It took some thinking to figure out what was going on in his worldview, and where t