He is a great professor. He seems to be really challenging and hard at first, but if you keep up with his lectures, and make sure to do all the practice questions, you will be fine. He holds extra office hours before exams, and is willing to repeat his explanations multiple times. If you put the effort in, getting a good grade is possible in this class. Good luck!

McDevitt is a great resource if you want to actually learn. He relates all the theories he teaches to what happens in the real world. He writes on the white board straight from memory, and seems like a really old-times professor. His midterms and final can be tricky because you really need to understand the material, and you can't just learn the examples he does. Which is what makes him awesome. And the final is easier than the midterms, simply because the material get's easier. You absolutely should have a good TA (read: Carlos) because McDevitt's practice problems aren't enough. If your TA doesn't give practice problems, run out of that discussion as fast as you can. He is really knowledgeable though, and he can go on and on for 75 minutes without pausing, but you're sure to get absorbed if you like economics. Study hard, you'll definitely get an A. I did.

For fall 2014.
I think Mcdevitt is great. 

He is an efficient lecturer. For every class, we take 6 to 7 pages of notes in average. His lectures are also well structured. Usually it starts with a concept or definition, then he explains several possible cases and elaborates with graphs. Math is an essential part and he definitely puts effort to make it understandable. When I was reviewing for the tests, I could get to the point directly without staring at my notes and trying hard to figure out what I have written down.

Of course, his old lecture notes are avaliable on the CCLE class website, but I will still suggest every to take notes and follow his lectures, and review at the end of the day.

He holds regular office hours in the form of small classes. They are pretty helpful as the professor goes over the your question step by step. Before exams, he holds extra review sessions to answer questions collectively. 

He doesn't have graded homework. Study questions are important. Make sure you do all of those that are suggested. They are similar to test questions.

His tests, as others said, are difficult than those of many other professors. But you definitely learn and practice more when you are preparing for the tests. His multiple choice questions have 7 to 8 options, so educated guess doesn't work really well.
Just solve for the right answer and circle it. He also has fill-in-blank questions, which are worth little points but require certain amount of time. His essay questions are also very standard - given some conditions, you need to illustrate the case with graph, math, and short explanations in words.

What makes his tests difficult is that you have to know the concept back and forth. For instance, if he tells you something about increasing a tax, you need to think about the cases for decreasing a tax, increasing and decreasing a subsidy by yourself. Exploring all the possiblities will make you "invincible" to his questions.

The averages of two midterms were around 51%. There were also people who succeeded with almost perfect scores. In the end you will be ranked according to your cumulative scores of three tests that worth 100, 145, and 250 individually. Average score is probably something around B, and if you screw up one of those, don't worry, make it up later. The gap between the top A class and the average is not impossible to catch on.

There a few things to complain about the class.

First of all, it is early in the morning. You might it hard to keep up with him for 75 minutes without a cup of cofffee.

Second, he rarely pauses during the class. It seems that he has so much to teach. I often feel exhausted after the lectures and can't concentrate for the next one hour.

Lastly, the graders are harsh. Imagine they have 300 hundred tests to go over so they won't be patient to read your test. One of the TAs, simply marked off 90% points of a question if your answer doesn't appear right in the firsthand. I saw a lot of people arguing with him. I mean, graders do make mistakes, but someone who has a line of student arguing for hours isn't common. Before you argue, make sure the other parts of the questions are 100% correct, because he will grade the entire question and give a new grade to it, not only the part you want him to look at.

Overall, I find I have nothing to complain about professor Mcdevitt himself, but other things may prohibit his econ 11 to be the best. Still, I felt really happy to learn with him and I am 100% sure I will take him again.

Fast pace, bunch of notes to take, and not enough time to comprehend them all while taking notes in lecture. Old lecture notes uploaded by the professor does not help me comprehend his lecture either. Spent half of my time in the quarter I took this class staring at my note trying to figure out what the professor was trying to say.

Honestly, this class reminded me of high school. The professor threw a couple of people out of class for looking at their cell phones and he wouldn't answer questions (except the shortest "yes or no" type) during lecture.

Other posts here site being impressed with McDevitt's ability to conduct his lectures without notes. He's been doing the exact same lecture, almost word-for-word, for at least 7 years (see the 2007 notes available at the student store). No doubt that he "knows the material", as he's just reciting from a script. This explains his reluctance to answer questions or relate any of the formulas to real-life situations during lecture: if he veers off the script, he risks "losing his place" in it. The lack of notes is not impressive.

He basically writes formulas and charts on the board as fast as possible and you're supposed to just memorize it all and spit it back up on the exams. If you like that type of high school-style class, then I suppose you'll love it and think that he's "the best teacher at UCLA".
(Honestly, anyone saying that gives me the impression that they took McDevitt during the summer as a visiting high school student or as a UCLA freshman, because there are some outstanding, brilliant professors at UCLA and their classes are very different from McDevitt's.)

But if you actually like college-style classes wherein the formulas the professor is giving you are actually taught as they relate to concepts in the world's economic landscape and the class can have a dialogue about that relationship, you're going to be disappointed. You will instead feel like you're in 10th grade all over again.

Tips for his exams:
-Just memorize everything from lecture. His study questions are good practice, but make sure you have the charts memorized exactly as he put them on the board.
-If he has 8 questions on the exam, just think of them as actually being 40 questions. Each one of his questions has 3-6 “parts” to them that each takes some dedication of time.
-And, by the way, don’t buy the textbook. It’s hella expensive and he never referenced it, never gave any assignments out of it, and didn’t ask any exam questions related to problems in the book. His exams, like I said, are ALL about spitting up everything he wrote on the board during lecture.

Unfortunately, pretty damn boring.

He is absolutely great. He is really teaching as oppose to just throwing concepts and problems like most other professors would do. He knows the stuff he teaches very well and can explain whatever you ask perfectly clear. Exams are not that difficult once you understand his problem sets and lecture notes. I feel he is the best professor I've met in ucla.

Professor McDevitt is great.

His classes may be relatively more difficult than other highly rated professors (Sproul, ahem) but he will not just spit information at you. He will teach. That is something UCLA lacks in spades and McDevitt is certainly doing his part to help.

Anyways, just make sure you fully understand the problem set and to remember the small side remarks he makes. The exams consist of questions just like those in the problems set plus some of these side remarks thrown in to set apart the excellent students from the good ones.

Great teacher! He teaches from memory, which makes the lectures daunting and quick-paced. Take good notes and you should be fine. Otherwise, I'd recommend buying his lecture notes at the store. That way, you can better focus on what he's teaching in class instead of copying off the board. I'd definitely recommend him

Good class. Study questions were very helpful. He's hard to keep up with, but as long as you get the basic ideas and examples you should be covered for the tests. Absolutely did not need the book.

If every professor is like him, my college life would be so much easier. I got an easy A+. I did not spent much time on his econ11. There was no homework. Just understand everything in the lecture notes and study questions, you will at least get an A.And my TA,Kang Minjin, is very concern and helpful.