I am a 4th year cognitive science student, and for once out of my entire experience here at UCLA as an undergrad I wish I had listened to the cautionary BruinWalk reviews.

Professor Cheng seems to have a genuine interest for student learning, but she is not effective in implementing it. She consistently comes to class 5-15 minutes late, her voice is quiet, and her authority lacks the scaffolding necessary to encourage student engagement. Less than half of the seats are filled in the class on a regular basis and at any given point of the lecture students are dozing off, on their phones, or just generally unresponsive. The power point presentation material itself is interesting but the manner in which she presents it is extremely dry and unfocused because she reads straight off of them without elaborating and assumes we understand it as she moves through them. The majority of students were not content with the midterm - NOT because we scored poorly, but rather because it was not representative of the time we spent covering topics in class. I understand that her approach to teaching is to encourage thinking (as that is the course title) rather than strict memorization, but her midterm was discouraging because I do not feel like I learned anything constructive on a measurable basis. I would absolutely not recommend this class to my peers.

Took 124 F--Thinking...Professor Cheng is so scatterbrained and all over the place. she really wants to help but she does a terrible job. i think she forgets that we aren't inside of her head and she expects you to just know certain things that are not commonsensical. She is very loving and wants to help but is not a very good professor. she tries to be fair though with her grading. the exams are pretty difficult and you don't have enough time to complete them. there is a lot of reading but it can be interesting if you like to think...go figure...the class is called thinking. definitely not an easy a.

Lectures were usually unclear and unhelpful because she is really spacey. She shows up late, talks about unrelated topics for 10 minutes, doesn't remember how to work the projector, and is generally disorganized. This wastes a lot of class time. The only redeeming quality of her class was that she did not assign homework. To further explain her flakiness and poor organizational skills, a week into the winter quarter, we still don't have our grades, and she has not responded to emails. She seems to care, but she is too scatter-brained to be helpful or clear.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE if you have any love for yourself NEVER TAKE THIS CLASS! In my 4 years at UCLA, I have never been compelled to write a bruin walk review until now. This is not a joke. Please trust me and never take this class. I promise you any other class will be better suited to fulfill your requirements. I took the class online during the pandemic. Even though she repeatedly ensured us that lecture material and recordings would be posted, it rarely was. When it was posted it was incomplete. Her slides alone are confusing or incomplete. The way she lectures is so convoluted and incoherent that you are constantly left confused and frustrated. You'll only manage to understand anything about the concepts from the several extremely dense and long weekly readings. The short answer exams are ridiculously long, difficult, and contain poorly phrased inarticulate questions. This truly was the worst class I've ever taken. Don't take this review lightly. Taking this class is not worth it under any circumstances.

A paper was written to test reading fluency as a mediator between unnecessarily long word usage and subjective ratings of the writer's intelligence. I kid you not - from Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly. Oppenheimer, 2006:
"Twenty-five randomly chosen dissertation abstracts from the Stanford University sociology department were examined, and the abstract with the highest proportion of words of nine letters or longer was chosen (Chang, 1993)."
Yes that Chang was our Professor Patricia Chang.

She's super nice, but when a paper for another class cites her as being difficult to understand, you realize why you learned almost nothing from her class.

I honestly think Dr Cheng is a very kind person, however, I agree with the reviews here that she is very disorganized. She is not very good at explaining the material in lecture, so if you're not sure about something you'd better go to office hour to clarify. Dr. Cheng is always very willing to help you outside of class! Even though the logic of rational thinking in this class is intuitive to me (since I've been always interested in rational thinking, and have taken a logic class before), I studied my ass off for the midterm and final. I'm confident to say that NO ONE studied as hard as I did for this class!! I carefully went through all the details in the readings, went to office hour frequently, and pulled 2-3 consecutive all nighters before two exams. Maybe I overstudied, but my point is that you have to work REALLY hard to get good grades. The workload it requires to get an A is on par with PSYCH 186 series imo. If you're taking this class, make sure you understand every details on the study guide. You will suffer and learn a lot in this class... but is it worth it? I could be wrong, but I think it is --- and it's always painful to be rational.

Professor Cheng means well and definitely knows her stuff but isn't the best at communicating it with the class. She's a really nice and intelligent woman but her teaching style just doesn't work. It's often hard to follow. Ultimately, I ended up getting an A+ in this class but it was a LOT of work to study for tests because I had to teach myself a lot of the material. The review sessions and office hours saved me - she is much better at explaining one on one when you can ask very specific questions. She also offered a huge chunk of extra credit by doing a final paper so with that, you'll be fine. And the plus side of it all is that the topics of this class are interesting!