Blank is such a considerate and friendly instructor. It's clear how much he cares about the content and how passionate he is about the entire field of cognitive science. Homework assignments were fairly heavy reading, but responses were majority completion based and the assignments got easier as the quarter went on. The class also had two group projects, which considering that the class was online, really weren't too bad. All grading was generous, and the lectures were clear. Blank was also super approachable at office hours and during lecture. Highly suggest taking this class with him if you get the chance!

This was a hard class with a lot of assignments with different formats, attendance requirements, etc, but the material was thoroughly engaging.

Loved the lectures (wish it wasn't at 2PM though)! Workload was manageable, but definitely start the assignments and projects EARLY. I stayed up very late finishing up the group project, but this might be because my group members were very unhelpful. Final wasn't too hard because I had a cheat sheet with EVERYTHING written on it, but the exam covered content across the entire quarter so make sure you go through everything!

I looked forward to this class, but Professor Blank was a real disappointment. The positive is that he is knowledgeable of the material, but here is the negative:
- He really likes to listen to himself, not interaction in class.
- He stated the first day that he made this class difficult on purpose; why??
- The assignment is not connected to the lectures, and he said he gave very difficult research to analyze, knowing that we wouldn't understand them, and if we didn't, we should ask out peers, for sure someone will get them, not him, not once he said come to office hours for this matter.
- he said we had to figure it out by ourselves because when we are in a working environment, nobody will tell us how to do things, so we have to start now. But aren't we paying you big money to teach us, so that when we go to work, we know how to do things??
- No feedback of any kind on our work until after the final. I had the first grade of my assignment the day after the final; how was it useful?
- It felt like he had no time for us and he structured the class so that he had the least amount of work to do. There is no discussion class with a TA, so there is no hope of reviewing the material in a class environment.
It was a bad experience for me, I really wanted to learn something, but I really didn't. UCLA should use motivated teachers, not researchers that don't want to do their job.

Take this class if you want a free A. I took this class alongside 2 math classes and a PIC class and had little time to dedicate to PSYCH85. Despite what other reviews may imply, this is the easiest class I've taken at UCLA. For assignments you have 5 written responses, completing them alone gives 100%, then 2 are chosen to be graded based on content. These are graded not too harshly, but there are some unclear questions which lead me and probably others to be docked despite having what seemed to be a correct answer. Then there are two projects you do with a group based on studies, they are pretty interesting and the projects are very easy. These projects are not graded harshly, getting 90%-95% on them requires minimal work. There is plenty of extra credit too, I think I earned 3%. The "hardest" part of this class is the final. One important thing to note, the final covers specific examples from in class, it will specifically ask you what happened in this study we read in class. I missed many classes, but brought a cheat sheet to the final as allowed, but it was little help. That was because the final didn't ask for many definitions or to explain a concept. It was all MC and asked specific questions about what happened in this study or what would you expect to happen in this study (your expectation would come from remembering what happened in the class example). Many studies I remembered from class and still could not recall the expectation on the exam, I also did not study at all though because of other classes. I got 60% on the final and still managed an A. Finally, Idan is super nice, tries to be extremely inclusive, and is always helping students. Definitely take this class, it's a free A (or A+ if you don't bomb the final like me).

For an introductory course, this course was quite a lot of work. Idan is a very nice and outgoing person, however, I struggled a lot with his style of instruction. For one, during class, you aren't allowed to raise your hand to ask questions, you must rely on the TA to notice your question on the Google Forms survey. This, to me, was extremely unhelpful. I would often not get enough time to type in my question before Idan moved on. The coursework was fine, a lot of reading and answering questions. The two big projects were fine, but still heavy on the workload. All of the assignments are very strictly graded, and you can lose a lot of points for simply misreading the question or forgetting a simple detail. I felt this took away from my agency and creativity, and make the projects much more difficult. Additionally, the wording of questions in the homework was often very confusing, and I was only able to understand some after talking to other people in the class. Overall, if you have friends in the class, it's not too bad, but be prepared to complete a LOT of work, surveys, and projects.

This class was alright up until I tested positive for COVID-19 fall of 2020. While the professor seemed nice and accommodating during lectures, he became difficult to reach when I actually needed help and accommodations. Between my extreme respiratory symptoms and my inability to focus during the course, the professor was more or less unwilling to provide me extensions longer than a week while I was sick ( I was sick with COVID for 4 months after infection with a prior chronic respiratory illness ), did not help me with class participation credit and did not provide accommodations when it came time to taking the final. While I was nearly unable to participate in the group project (he didn't accommodate for that either) I maintained an A throughout the quarter, until the end, wherein he failed me on the final exam and politely wrote in an email that "it wouldn't matter in the long term regardless." While I was keen on reporting this to the dean of students initially, I just hope to warn other students of signing up for this class and maintaining any kind of contact with Idan Blank and his TAs.

One of the best professors at UCLA hands down

This class was difficult for an intro class. The bulk of the work is writing weekly papers based on long studies. Attendance is required and it's worth 12% of your grade even for online lectures. There are two group projects that are worth 24% of your grade and your partners are randomly chosen. I heard for in-person classes, they just made a poster, but for online classes, we had to make a video. This was a lot of work and if your partners are not helpful, you're basically screwed. His grading is pretty harsh too even though he doesn't give that much instruction for the assignments. Idan is a pretty nice person and is obviously passionate about the subject, but his class was hard. However, the grading scale is pretty generous. An 88 is an A and he doesn't give out -A's.

According to Professor Blank, the goal of this class was to "challenge you, but not tank your grade". Given the grade distribution of the class (63% As, according to the end of the quarter email that he sent out), I'd say that he succeeded pretty well with the second part of the goal (maybe even better than he expected). However, keep in mind that he was very lenient due to the circumstances (COVID, George Floyd, etc.). For example, he had 4 different methods of weighting the assignments for the final grade, and our assignments were weighted with the method that resulted in the highest final grade. Also, he lowered the grade cut offs (88% was the cut off for an A).
Although he was lenient with grading, I'd say that this class challenged me pretty well. I loved the material, but sometimes concepts were difficult connect. The 6 written assignments were difficult as well; for these assignments, you basically read 3 scientific papers and answer questions about them. Personally, sometimes I had to think long and hard about how the questions were even related to the papers; however, once you understand this, the questions were not too bad. It was also nice that only 2 of these written assignments were graded, and you got to choose which two.
Group projects were okay; they were actually easier than the assignments, and I felt like I spent only a bit more time on my part of the project than on an individual written assignment.
Overall, Professor Blank is super passionate and knowledgeable about the subject. You can tell he puts a lot of effort into his lectures and that he loves teaching.