Professor Blank is....the G.O.A.T. I loved this class so much! This was my last pre-req before declaring the Cog Sci major, and I'm so glad I waited to take it until now! Blank is caring, intelligent, funny, and engaging. Although lectures were dense, surveying different sub-fields of Cognitive Science through theory and experiment examples, he had an ability to keep us all engaged. His slides were also gorgeous - you can tell he put a lot of effort into this class.
LECTURE
Lecture was twice a week, with no discussion. Blank would include in-class participation through PollEverywhere, where we gave our hypotheses/responses to hypothetical scenarios or real psychological experiments. This ensured that students participated in class and paid attention. These were completion based, and if you couldn't attend lecture, then you could watch a separate, asynchronous lecture that you sign up for and complete your participation points there instead. He used psychological experiments and case studies to explain certain concepts in Cog Sci, like Bayesian inference, Imagery, Neural Networks, Computing, and Innate Knowledge. Every example he used was super interesting (and, as he said, were all his favorite experiments!).
ASSIGNMENTS
We had 6 writing assignments that we had a week to do. They were used to preface the following week's material. These usually took me about 5-7 hours to complete, reading 2-3 papers and answering some questions on it in a page or less. They are not straightforward, instead requiring you to deeply engage in the research process and understand the paper at a deeper level (connecting to theories, drawing your own conclusions, etc). I thought the assignments were challenging, but fair. They were graded on completion, with 2 of the 6 assignments (that we picked), graded on content accuracy. I'm not sure how they were graded, but I got high scores on them. Immediately after the turn in deadline, he provided us with videos going over the assignment answers, so we could have an understanding of how far off our answers were in deciding which assignments to grade for content. More than generous imo! We also had two group assignments (randomly assigned based on student time availabilities), in which we had to create ~15 min videos where we go over a research paper within the subfields of Cognitive Science and try to explain it for a general audience. The project instructions were very clear, and the graded was pretty lenient (instructor grade - the TA + group member peer grading + other group grading).
EXAM
There was only a final exam for this class, which consisted of 7 short response essays that each had 2-3 parts. We had all of finals week to complete this, and were able to collaborate as a group. I found the final really time consuming, but the problems weren't super hard. Some questions asked you to summarize and idea from lecture, others required us to calculate probabilities, and others required you to analyze experiments. I didn't find any questions super left field, because you could find the answers or procedure in lecture videos.
GRADE BREAKDOWN (this is the standard breakdown, some breakdown variations were possible after the final exam)
Weekly Assignments Completion (7): 35/35 - 14% of grade
Weekly Assignments Content (2): 34.9/35 - 14% of grade
In-class Participation (PollEverywhere): 30/30 (we can miss 3 lectures) - 12% of grade
Group Project 1: 24.7/25 - 10% of grade
Group Project 2: 34.9/35 - 14% of grade
Final Exam: 90/90 - 36% of grade
Extra Credit: 5 points
Overall Grade:
254.5/250 = 101% = A+
This class had altered grade cutoffs, with a raw score of 88+ being an A, and a raw score of 94+ being an A+.
Summary:
Take this class. You will love it. It's challenging, but so rewarding, and Professor Blank takes you on an educational journey with him! Thank you so much Idan!!!!

Super nice and helpful professor, he just assigns a lot of dense readings. It's still manageable, just hard to understand. The lectures in class and the tests I think are both reasonable. I'd recommend this class but just know you'll be doing a lot of reading.

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.

I think the class overall was fine. The only homework you really had was to read a research paper and then to meet with your pod to discuss the research paper (it had to be recorded on zoom and submitted). You then took a 5 question quiz on the paper, which was fine, but it takes a while to get used to the style of research papers and to figure out what is important to know for the quizzes. You also had assigned videos that weren't graded on if you watched them or not, but a few questions on the final referenced the videos, so it's in your best interest to watch them. Lectures are recorded, but only audio and you can't adjust the speed (like put it on 1.5x or 2x). There was quite a bit of extra credit throughout the quarter. No discussion section, which I didn't like because you're learning very new concepts but with little support from the professor or TA. That brings me to my next point: usually classes are taught cumulatively where everything builds on one another (think of a lego tower where each topic is a brick), but in this class, I swear it felt like a weird circle. The topics were loosely related to one another and sometimes it felt like whiplash when we switched topics. Go to office hours, make sure you attend class, and try to stay on top of lectures.

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.

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.

Idan is a nice and friendly guy, but I wouldn’t take this class with him again. Right from the start, he mentioned that grades don’t really matter in this course—but the issue is you literally can’t see your grade at all. There’s also no way to check the class average on quizzes, so you have no clue if you’re doing well or not. He also mentioned that he made this course difficult on purpose, so prepare to put in a lot of work.

Attendance is mandatory since he uses Poll Everywhere to track participation, and the final exam is all multiple-choice and short-answer questions based on lecture slides and assigned videos (you actually have to go to class to succeed). You're allowed to miss 3 lectures in the quarter. He does allow 3 double-sided cheat sheets on the final, but unless you make them really good, they might not help much. There is no midterm for this course.

Instead of a discussion section, there are mandatory learning pod meetings where you discuss a weekly paper with a small group to prep for quizzes. The quizzes are super-specific and kinda unpredictable, so even if you understand the readings, you might still get thrown off. Also, the papers don’t always connect with the lectures, which can be frustrating.

Overall, the class structure is engaging, but the lack of grade transparency and quizzes not aligning with the lecture made it stressful. Take him if he's your only choice, but I'd rather choose a different professor.

One of the best professors at UCLA hands down

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).

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.