do not take this class if you care about your grades a lot. It’s practically up to chance given how harshly they grade the group project and even if your part gets 100 you get the same grade as the group. I got an A on both exams, 100 on discussion quizzes, and 100 by the rubric on all the parts of my group project. But I got an A- (my first at ucla and I’m a third year who’s almost done with the major) because my group members tanked the group project score. She also completely lies and claims she’ll curve the class anywhere from 1-3% but just straight up didn’t and then deleted the campuswire.

Class was okay. I think she changed how she did the class from previous quarters. We had a group project which was about 32% of our grade- 10% initial submission, 7% peer review, and 15% final submission. This part depends on how committed your group is, and groups form from discussion section. Disc section is not mandatory, but another 18% of our grade comes from minilabs, which are just completion based Canvas quizzes, but they were good for review. 25% midterm/25% final, final was 50 questions, midterm was 36. You have to do a lot of studying for the exams, I started at least a week in advance and still did average/slightly above average, but I'm also not a great test taker. I barely went to lecture as I felt that she just said everything that was on slides anyway, but some people found the lectures to be helpful. The concepts themselves are very dense, and honestly were more neuro heavy that I anticipated. I did the 3% extra credit through SONA studies, and I think that's she also curved the class, though I'm not sure by how much.

If youre taking over the summer, she monitors attendance through zoom polls which is annoying because she will only have 2 for the entire 2 hour lecture but you do not know when she will ask them so you just gotta be on your feet the whole time. Class is really easy but I hard sold on the final quiz and dropped my grade to a A-, otherwise should have ended with a comfortable A. Quizzes are open notes and open book, 15 questions, 13 MC and 1-2 Short Answer. You can get an easy A if you put even a little effort but don't completely doze off like I did. D:

Dr. Murray should not be a professor of this class anymore because she is not suited to meet the needs of lower classman. This was supposed to be an introductory course to Cognitive Science and was the first time I had been exposed to this material. Dr. Murray zoomed through 75 completely full slides per class with zero breaks or explanations. Every lecture I was struggling to write down notes because of her speed, and everything on the slides was crucial information. We deep-dived into every possible topic; it was not an introductory level. One positive aspect is she did post the slides and an audio recording after class.
The readings she assigned were also not introductory. Some of them were 30 pages of complete gibberish. When I visited her in office hours expressing my confusion, she would ask me what I did understand, and then state exactly what I had said in more complex words. She refused to help me on any of the assignments and shot down my ideas for the papers (even when the TA said they were solid ideas). Dr. Murray did not respond to emails, in fact, she ignored emails on purpose because of her "avoidant attachment style" (verbatim what she told us in class).
During the chaos with the protests on campus, she had ZERO care about the mental and physical well-being of her students. She ignored our emails and pleas to accommodate the midterm and then did not post the study material she promised us a week earlier until TWO DAYS before the midterm.
With the TA strike, she told us that she was going to grade our assignments, but not post the grades online for us to see, to be "in solidarity" with the strike. If she was truly in solidarity, she wouldn't have graded at all, so her explanation made zero sense. When receiving pushback from students about this, she said she would give us "24 hours' notice" of our grades being posted before they were finalized, as if that would be helpful (and that notice was never given btw).
As for her exams, they are designed to be overly complicated and trick you. Her questions are complex examples going beyond what was discussed in class and multiple answers are designed to look like the correct one. And once again, she promised us study material, and it was not posted until three days before the final. Additionally, Dr. Murray made a discussion board for us to ask her questions about the exam and promised to answer them by 5 PM the day before: not a SINGLE question was answered. Students asked Dr. Murray for three weeks to move the final online, as every other class had done, and she refused to do so unless “UCLA forced her to.” In the middle of the night before our final, literally less than 8 hours before, she sent us an email moving the exam online. I know that I ultimately ended with a great grade, but that was entirely thanks to the hours of extra work I did outside the class, not to the professor.

Prof Murray was very unorganized, procrastinated on posting exam resources (posted answers to exam questions at like 1am the day of the final), bad communication, and the class was extremely dense for an intro class. I would advise against taking with this prof.

All things considered, I enjoyed this class. I can definitely see why it left some students frustrated though. In my opinion, Dr. Murray is a good lecturer and a nice/approachable person; with that being said, her exams were quite challenging. They were open note, but some of the questions were pretty jargony and/or required a decent chunk of extra intuition/thinking, which resulted in an okay average for the midterm and a low (especially for the Psych department) average on the final. You definitely need to study.

We learned all the intricacies of vision and a decent amount on auditory perception, which I found pretty interesting. We had two projects/papers as well in which we read scientific articles related to either somatosensation or audition and made comparisons to lecture content on vision. I feel like this was a great way to get some extra practice for scientific writing, but many students found the projects quite boring. If you are a science-oriented person who likes to understand the fine-grained details of perceptual processes, this class probably won't be too bad. However, if you're somebody who only really enjoys the social sciencey part of psych, you're in for a wild ride.

Overall, you definitely have to work for your grade. I took Psych 115, and I would consider this more difficult. Even some neuroscience/premed people were struggling with the exams, which I feel speaks to the depth with which you need to understand the material. Dr. Murray was kind enough to change our grading scheme to unweighted, so people did not do too bad overall grade-wise. If you want to learn a lot (even though the content might not seem to have much real-world applicability) and are confident in your test-taking abilities, I don't think this class is nearly as bad as other students portray it to be. However, there are definitely easier classes to take.

I definitely recommend taking this class with Dr. Murray! She is extremely accommodating (open note online exams, opportunity for 3% EC for sona studies, and gave the whole class an extension when some students had power outages). Honestly, sensation and perception aren’t my favorite areas of psychology/neuroscience, but she presented the information very clearly and her exams were fair (she even added points to make up for a couple unclear questions). Discussions are helpful but not mandatory, and there is an included grade boost for online “minilabs” graded on completion. The other aspect of the gradebook is a two-part project that involves reading a total of 6 research papers on either auditory or tactile perception. This project is time consuming (definitely space it out!) but not graded harshly — I didn’t edit mine at all and got 100%. Some students were frustrated when she changed the bruinlearn gradebook to accurately reflect her syllabus grading scheme presented at the beginning of the quarter, but she was very receptive to student feedback and reverted to the more lenient scale presented on bruinlearn. Though the content was challenging at times, I learned a lot in this course and thought the expectations were very fair.

This class is a hit or miss however, I really enjoyed this class. Professor Murray is a first time professor but she did her best this year! She is really understanding when it comes to assignments if you reach out to her with appropriate timing. The assignments consist of mini labs which were graded on completion, two exams, and two project assignments. Her exams are hard so you do have to study but she allowed open notes! The two projects I admit were time consuming but not difficult to complete. It consisted of reading 3 articles and writing 2 page essays for each article giving a summary of the article and connecting it to lectures. There was the whole situation with her making a mistake on the weighting scale and causing a shift in grades the last week, but she was willing to hear from students despite feeling all the heat from stressed out students and changed the scale back to the original. Overall, Professor Murray was understanding and a really nice professor.

This has actually been the worst class I have taken at UCLA ever. W/ it being her first year teaching she really needs more practice. Gave terrible projects that were supposed to deepen our learning on sensation and perception but were timed terribly with the midterm and final and were boring and time consuming. She is dry, boring, and does not explain anything better in class or in OH. She fucked up our grades in week 10 and got upset when all students asked for a change back and she took out her anger by not helping us in OH SHE HOSTED and TOLD US TO COME TO!? Rude, hard to follow lectures, hard exams, bad grading scale-- please do not take this course with her, take it with someone capable like Andrew Frane, at least he knows what he is talking about and is actually funny.

Prof Murray is overall a great teacher and I had a very enjoyable experience in her class. Lecture content is framed perfectly and I found it very straightforward. Her slides are some of the more digestible ones I've found here at UCLA.

She's also very kind and cares about the learning of her students. She's always willing to help!