I don't know, I have mixed feelings about this guy. He comes off as being likable and approachable, but in reality, he's neither. His course is basically STRAIGHT out of the textbook, you have to learn the entire corporate finance textbook save like two chapters at the end. You will have to do EACH AND EVERY ONE of the problems out of the end of the chapters in the book, which amounts to hundreds of problems. You need to know how to do each one because the midterm and final is problems straight out of the book. Now, if you're a self-study person who never likes to go to class, then you may actually end up liking this class; you can literally never step foot in class and learn as much as someone who did, since everything is in the book. As for class... its a mixed bag. You can tell Atkeson is very knowledgeable guy in his field, and he will flavor some of the material with his own personal stories and opinions. Since the entire field of finance pretty much fell apart in the past year or so, he had a lot of interesting things to say. So I did attend most lectures, along with probably around 15 other people out of 50. It didn't really help me on the midterm or final, in fact, if you were to skip lecture and strictly study the book you might even end up going better in this class. At the end of the day, I do feel like I learnt a lot about finance, which I suppose was the point of the course.

His tests are based on homework problems, which is fair, but it's ridiculous that for our final, we had to study 17 chapters worth of homework problems, which we counted to be about 300 problems. He is one of the laziest professors I have had at UCLA. He uses another teacher's powerpoint lectures, which he clearly doesn't study too much before class, because he often spends class going "I remember there was a good slide I want to show you, but I can't seem to find it." He goes off on ridiculous tangents ALL the time. It's one of those classes where you don't have to go to class at all for the tests (which he gives too often--there's three midterms and a final). He teaches the class as though we are MBA students and know about finance already---this is supposed to be a intro to finance class, which he doesn't seem to understand. Overall, I would say that he is a very well-known professor, so if you are taking this class because you want a reccomendation from him or want to pursue econ for grad school or something, take the class. Otherwise, stay away. It's tedious and you really don't walk away learning much.

Professor Atkeson is a very good finance professor. He\355s concerned about student learning and tells his students to ask questions about the homework problems before lecture begins. The two midterms and finals contain questions that are very similar, if not the same, to the homework problems. If you study all the homework problems that he assigns, then you\355ll get an A for the class. He teaches the important concepts of finance, which makes it more fun to learn. You have to keep up with this class because it is really easy to fall behind in doing the homework problems and reading the chapters. Otherwise, easy class.

This prof. is absolutely horrible. He assigns you TONS of reading, but he does not explain anything. All he does is he reads the overhead, but does not explain anything whatsoever. And the overheads are just simply the main ideas literally speaking copied from the book. If people ask him a question in class and he does not have time to cover the new material then you are responsible on your own to figure it all out. Next class he goes on to a new topic before he covered the material from the previous class. Absolutely ridiculous!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I wish I had never signed up for the class...I will have to take finance with someone else to really learn something.