Take this class with Dr. Ho!!!!

This class was a pivotal moment in my academic journey—it solidified my decision to pursue psychology and stands out as one of the best courses I’ve taken at UCLA. While the content itself is engaging, what truly sets this class apart is Dr. Ho. Her background in neuroscience adds incredible depth, and the way she connects social psychology principles with neuroscience and biology is both unique and fascinating.

The course is fast-paced, with a lot of material to cover, but Dr. Ho’s teaching style and dedication to her students make it manageable and rewarding. She is extremely responsive, deeply cares about her students’ success, and creates an environment where learning feels both challenging and supportive. Her ability to make complex concepts approachable ensures that you not only succeed in the class but also truly understand the material.

If you’re planning to take Psych 127B, I can’t recommend taking it with Dr. Ho enough. It’s a challenging but truly rewarding experience that will leave a lasting impact!

this class sucked lol. do not recommend. it was so much content but she never explained things thoroughly. also expected us to remember legit every word she said, even if briefly glossed over. she is also pretty monotone.

I highly recommend taking this class! The topics were interesting, like depression and personality disorders. Like a previous reviewer said, my only issue was that I wanted to cover more content. Also, Professor Ho was incredibly helpful during office hours and very open to chatting with her students. Her research is about stress on adolescents and how it affects development (super cool)!

The tests were multiple-choice, and you definitely should study as there is a lot of content and some questions were tricky. That said, everything you need to know is on the slides, and I thought the tests were fair. There were two exams when I was in this class, but she let us take an optional final so we could drop a lower score, which was super nice of her to provide that option. I studied a lot for the first two, so I didn't take the final. Discussion sections were also pretty chill, mandatory attendance with one drop. Overall, Professor Ho is great and I recommend you take her class!

Professor Ho is pretty good. For this quarter she offered 3 tests (2 midterms and 1 final) and you were able to drop your lowest score, so if you did well on the midterms you wouldn't even have to take the final. You're also allowed a 5x8 index card (front and back) to write info on to use during the tests, which definitely saved my grade. Lectures are pretty dense and she talks kind of fast, so I'd def recommend having the slides open/downloading and annotating them so you don't miss out on any information.
Fair warning, the tests do go pretty in depth and some questions can only be found in the textbooks (not lectures), but I didn't read the textbook at all and still got an A. I think the best way to do good on the tests is to 100% understand the content from the lectures, but luckily most test questions are straightforward with only a couple being a little tricky.
She also offers extra credit!! Up to 5 points of SONA credit and a couple points for the end-of-quarter evaluation, make sure to do those !

Once again, highly recommend! This was the first class I took with Dr. Ho (second was Psych 126, equally recommend), and the first time that she taught this course! I'm sure that since then, she has made modifications to the course, but from my experience, the content in this class is exactly what I hoped would be covered! From anxiety to depression to ADHD to personality disorders to psychotic disorders, my intellectual curiosity only grew afterwards! I do wish that more disorders like eating disorders (related to anxiety and depression but still its own category) could have been studied. Exams were not bad if you studied the comprehensive presentation slides and read the papers assigned (not much honestly!). Take this class for elective credit :)

Her lectures are useful if you're interested in psychology, She offers weekly quizzes which you can take again after the answer is revealed. Overall If you read the slides and the textbook you'll perform well on the exams.

This content of this class was super interesting but difficult in my opinion. Prof. Ho is super knowledgable and made her lectures engaging but there was just way too information to pack into one quarter. This class had a point based grading scheme out of 300 points (discussions - 50, quizzes - 50, exam #1 - 100 and exam #2 - 100). Discussions were mandatory but you could miss one. Weekly quizzes were pretty easy and you had unlimited attempts. Exam #1 was basically the midterm and exam #2 was during week 10 but it was not cumulative. If you didn't do well on one of the exams, you had the option to take a cumulative final during finals week. The exams were super difficult, even with one of them being online due to the encampment. You are expected to study EVERYTHING from the lectures and read the textbook in order to perform well. Even though I studied really hard for the exams, I got a B average on them because there were still a handful of questions that I'd be unsure about because they were so specific. Prof. Ho offered up to 5 points extra credit for doing Sona studies and 5 points for doing the course evaluation so that took from a B+ to an A- which was nice. I wouldn't take this class as your first choice for a psych upperdiv but it was still interesting nonetheless and I learned a lot!