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!

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.

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.

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.

Psych 124A is incredibly interesting, but also incredibly difficult. I would be cautious when enrolling in this class because the workload and the course material really pile up. I believe I spent 18+ hours a week (outside of class) on writing assignments / problem sets. And I still barely scraped up C's on my submissions.
Despite the difficulty and workload, the material itself is fascinating. Topics ranged from phrase-structuring to developmental cognition to Bayesian inferencing. Overall, take this class if you're really interested in the intertwines of linguistics and cog sci. But if you're just looking for a good grade, this class is definitely not for you.

Idan is the sweetest professor and he definitely knows what he's talking about. He is super approachable during office hour and very passionate about teaching. However, this course is not easy and requires your dedication to it. His lectures include a lot of studies and those will be in your final so make sure you take notes down. Every week there will be an assignment composed of either 1) 3 papers + written assignment or 2) a problem set, and both take more time than you would think, so start early and plan accordingly. He encourages collaboration between students, so make sure you check your answer with somebody else before you submit because making careless mistakes is so common especially in problem sets. That being said, don't worry about your grade too much because you will get a lot of chances for bonus points and probably a large curve for the final. I like that Idan really wants his students to learn something out of this class instead of over-concerning about their grades. For me, the class materials are very interesting and I genuinely think I gained some important knowledge on language and mind. If you are here to learn something interesting, I definitely recommend taking this class ;-)

The content of the class was interesting - Idan used great examples and covered cool concepts relating to cognitive science. Sometimes it was a little hard to understand the "bigger picture" and abstract concepts since he usually was specific in his lectures, but never really took a step back and connected the content together, you had to do that on your own. Despite this, I really enjoyed the class. Idan is super sweet and considerate and he really tries to make the lectures interesting and engaging. You do have to answer poll questions during class, but they are for participation (not graded on right vs wrong ansewr).
There were 6 one page responses to a few scientific papers each that we had to complete, but we only had to choose two to be graded for content. The grading for that was pretty harsh imo. There were also two group projects (both with the same randomly chosen people) to make a scientific poster about whatever topic related to cognitive science your group wanted to do. Those did not take much time to complete and were graded fairly. The final exam was a take-home essay of sorts where we basically just had to find the right studies discussed in the lectures for the prompts and talk about them. Throughout the quarter, Idan encouraged collaboration for the responses and the final exam which was nice.