Professor Hopkins is easy to understand, though sometimes he went through lecture slides pretty fast. He cares about students understanding the material and he is very knowledgeable about it. One issue I had with the course were the homework assignments given. I did not feel that lectures well-prepared students for them and I needed to turn to the textbook to learn the material. Overall though, Hopkins made the class enjoyable and I do believe that I learned a lot about mechanisms and mechanical design. His lecture slides are pretty detailed and I feel confident about turning to them in the future when I enter industry!

One of the best professors I have had at UCLA. His lectures are very clear and he posts the slides online so you can review them later. The final project was pretty tough but was one of the most design-heavy projects I have completed thus far. Overall a very good experience

Professor Hopkins is amazing. He is very smart. It's like he is a kungfu master for this class. He is really funny too. His jokes really made my days better. This quarter, our classroom sucks a lot. I have never had a classroom this bad, but he made the class atmosphere so enjoyable. He is such a positive individual, and he always came to class dressed up in a very nice and professional way.

Regarding the exam, he posted previous exams on CCLE, which is very nice. Students can get the taste of how his exams are going to be. Be careful though, yes it is somewhat similar to the exams he is going to give, but I would say that the similarity level is only 6/10. Oh yeah, the final exam for the Spring 2016 quarter was BADASS. The theme was star wars. I bet no other professor can ever make this kind of exam.

Final comment: he has a funny laugh. The whole class laughed so hard when he started laughing. Trust me, if his laugh does not make your day better, I don't know what will.

We stan Mr. John Hopkins, despite the class being online he's been a really clear teacher who explains things well and gives fair exams. Instead of zoom lectures he uploads all the videos on Youtube at once, and you watch them at your own pace. He tells you ahead of time what topics will be covered on the exams. There's two exams (one midterm and one "final" in week 9) that are both take-home exams for 24 hours, and they're difficult but straightforward. There's an individual final project due during finals week.

Professor Hopkins is a great lecturer and the material is quite interesting. The lectures are a good pace and I feel like I learned a lot from this class. The lectures are done from slides, but they are full of examples and it doesn't feel like an overload of information. For the zoom quarter, both midterm and final were take-home 24 hour tests (though they could easily be completed in under 2-3 hours). They were not too hard, and really tested if you knew the fundamentals of what was being taught. The final project definitely took quite a bit of time to finish, and can be hard if you're not comfortable with matlab. That being said, it's assigned from day 1 of class so you have all the time in the world to work on it. Overall, this class was a joy to take and I definitely recommend it!

Lectures were all prerecorded and were pretty clear. Grade was based off two tests and a project only. Tests were not too bad and were similar to the practice tests he gives. Project was a bit difficult, but shouldn't be too bad if you start a bit early.

This quarter he record all the lectures on Youtube, haha! He did not need to wake up early and give in person class, but postcard them all at the beginning of the quarter. It does not matter for we student, because I watch the record all the time due to the time difference. And he has office hour every week. The midterm is not very hard...even it is easy, very easy(But I got 93/100 lol). But the final is not very easy....Although I got 100, haha. But if you spend time read all the previous test and homework he provided, it is 100% enough to get 100. That is very very clear. It is fair, you spend time, and you can really get a high score.
And for the project, he posted at the beginning of the quarter, but I think the best time to start is after midterm and you watch all the videos. Remember stuff after Lec 10 will not be on final, they only work for project. This year's final is to design a 6 DOF system. You can modify one of the structure in his slides. (Remember not to share with your classmate)
Funny thing is, some students did not submit the project on time....?Prof feel that is unfair to previous student and others who on time, so....all the guys not on time get 0 for project. 30%!

Generally the professor is amazing, he created all the knowledge in this lecture! I never met a teacher can do that. He is teaching what he created in MIT's master and PHD! Good thing is the stuff is clear and designing is interesting. If time goes back, I would take this course again.

I'm a little surprised at the high reviews for this class. I thought Hopkins was a decent lecturer, but the use of recorded videos with so little interaction just didn't work for me. If I wanted to watch videos on YouTube, I could do that on my own, so personally I struggled to get motivated. Which was a shame because I really liked the subject matter and material. I thought that the exams were fairly challenging. I felt like since the tests were open book he wanted to give us things that he hadn't gone over in lecture. But overall the tests were pretty do-able, and I lost most of my points on stupid things like math errors or naming conventions. It was super important to pay attention to his specific conventions and our grader was pretty picky. I'd take this class with Hopkins again, but I'd probably spend a lot more time watching Hopkins work through various practice problems to get a better understanding of what the grader was looking for on the tests. The final project took a lot of time if you wanted to do it "right", but could probably be rushed through if you take some shortcuts.

Professor Hopkins is one of the best lecturers in the MAE department...which made me disappointed when even though the class was in-person, all of the lectures were pre-recorded on YouTube and we only met once a week to turn in homework and go over practice problems. (The YT lectures were still high quality although it was difficult to keep the motivation to watch them as the quarter wore on.)

Exams and homework were challenging but fair, the lectures give you a pretty good idea of the type of content you'll see.

The group project was a little weird--the groups were 10 people for what probably could have been a 3-4 person project which made it difficult to split up the work evenly. I guess rather have that than the other way around.

This class is less about learning how to design and build compliant mechanisms as it is about evangelizing the professor’s very specific and applicable approach to doing so. Mid-term and Final are each 35% of the grade, so do well on tests. Some concepts are introduced with no actual teaching (designing in CAD, how to do simple FEA, running somewhat complex MATLAB scripts) MSOL students without prior CAD, FEA, or MATLAB skills may struggle. The TA was not helpful and contradicted the professor at times, so be sure to lean on Professor Hopkins’ knowledge if you have questions. He was very reachable by email and you could tell he cared about the student experience.