Well presented material. I didn't go to class often but the lecture notes were very comprehensive. Definitely get a study group together-- made the class 100x easier. My friends who went to office hours said it was very helpful. Midterm and final were both take home and open note.

This class was not fun at all. The lectures were confusing af. I had to start drinking energy drinks before each lecture to even attempt to understand what was going on but still couldn't. The homeworks and exams were also pretty difficult.

The only way I managed to do well on this class was by going to TA office hours and discussion section every single week. The TA's hard carried this class. Boram and Valentina were literally the best TA's I've ever had. They explained the material much more clearly than the lecture.

The exams for this class are open-note and take-home, but absolutely don't let that fool you, as that just means the questions are much harder. Although the difficulty of the midterm was reasonable, the final was insane. It was probably one of the hardest finals I've ever had at UCLA. It felt as if we had been taught kindergarten arithmetic and then got questions on college calculus! It was not curved either.

Overall, I would not recommend this class unless you know you will have the time/motivation to consistently go to TA office hours and discussion every week and regularly review your notes. Then again, you'd be taking a gamble as it's not guaranteed future TA's would be as good as ours. Better to be safe than sorry; this class is a miss.

Zahra is sometimes criticized for her tangents during lecture, but I think she's mostly trying to answer people's questions and not hand-wave away what she thinks are curious ventures. She's extremely passionate about Syntax and is very deep in the research of the field as well. Her tangents mostly are contained and you are able to learn everything succinctly from her notes as well. She makes it very clear, so when you're drawing trees or modifying the current theory, Zahra makes it very clear the motivations, methods, and rules of doing so. I thoroughly enjoyed this class!