Professor Kavner seems like a wonderful person who is very knowledgable and passionate about the subject. However, I and the classmates I spoke to all feel very unprepared and lost in the class. Her lectures do not cover much of the material, and she has a tendency to go on tangents about content way outside the scope of this class and what she can expect her students to understand. This means that we don't cover much of the material. We are very behind her outlined plan in the syllabus. She seems to expect a much higher base knowledge from her students, which is surprising as this is supposedly an intro chemistry class. Coming into the final, I have no clue what kinds of questions she will test us on or the format of the test, as do many of my classmates. We are all very stressed about the final and about the next class in the series. Additionally, the textbook is very unclear and does not communicate the content effectively at an intro level. The professor's assigned homework seemed at times very detached from content we were learning, and often felt like busywork rather than effective practice.

I believe that this instructor is very knowledgeable and well prepared, but lectures could benefit from time dedicated to what will be on the homework.

I think the scope and learning objectives need to be more outlined, and there need to be more clear resources to study such objectives. The textbook is minimally helpful and often was much more complex than what we were expected to know and therefore did not help much.

You can pass this class with flying colors without ever knowing what's happening content wise. Kavner is nice (I'm pretty sure, I didn't go to lecture), and TAs are chill. She gives EC on hw and both midterms were online/asynchronous. You can skip lectures and still do fine in the class. She has participation quizzes in class but they're on canvas so you should be able to do them remotely. Don't plan on learning anything if you take her for 20a.

I am sure most the the 780 some students in this course all have the same feedback for Prof Kavner's instantiation of CHEM 20A: (most caring professor and not well organized, OWL/readings, problem sets, quizzes and exams all contained different content, lecture was entirely useless etc.)

Separately, there is simply too much content or perhaps the CANVAS had too many links it was supremely overwhelming. Some content is not used in future courses or will be covered in future courses. It would be good if a little was trimmed (eg. overlap from the requisite high school chemistry courses removed).

I love the enthusiasm that was apparent in each lecture, but there were often issues with quizzes and mistakes in lecture presentations. Sometimes, I had trouble understanding concepts, especially when they crossed over to the land of physics which I have no experience in. If I didn't go out of my way to learn concepts on Youtube, I wouldn't have succeeded with just attending lecture and doing the assignments.

The course is quite comprehensive, though it focuses almost unnecessarily heavily on quantum chemistry. Professor Kavner is an amazing and truly kind and willing person, but her teaching methods are not clear. Going to lectures did not help me learn the material, and I will likely have to go back through the entire textbook and synthesize the material on my own to prepare for the final. Her lectures were hard to track, it wasn't clear which information was more important than others, and it was overall very confusing. The TAs were also great, but Professor Kavner didn't provide much incentive for students (nor the TAs) to come to discussions as the only purpose was to finish the assigned homework during the discussion (which in most cases was already completed), and the logically didn't have much to add.

A lot of other people have already mentioned this, but Prof. Kavner is definitely a nice person, just a terrible professor. Everyone I know in this class was confused on the material, especially because lectures weren't helpful at all (a lot of people stopped coming during Week 2), though lectures are recorded, and she was extremely vague on what to expect for exams with her unhelpful learning objectives. She kept changing how assignments and grading worked halfway through the quarter, and the TAs were even confused on how to grade our problem sets. There is extra credit on problem sets, but that didn't really help since her grading scale had the cut off for an A at 95% (and an A+ was from a 99-110%). As of this quarter, there were weekly problem sets, online textbook assignments (these take longer than you'd expect), random participation quizzes during lecture, two online midterms through BruinLearn, and an in-person paper final. I hadn't taken AP Chemistry in high school, and I struggled a bit with teaching myself the material. The textbook was somewhat confusing (since half of the course is quantum mechanics), so I would recommend supplementing complex concepts with YouTube videos and finding study groups to work with. I personally found the final to be difficult since she put advanced questions on there that we hadn't practiced before during the class. I don't know exactly how I did on it, but it brought my grade down to an A-.

This class was not a good introduction to the potential of UCLA education. Although I loved Prof. Kavner as a person, she should not be teaching this class. It is unorganized, unstructured, and confusing. Even the TAs seemed confused half the time, because our homework assignments had little to no relation to the lectures, or we would learn the materials in the homework assignments weeks after they were due. I found that people were really stressed in this class, because literally no one knew what was going on. The lack of communication in this course was really shaking, especially when it came time for the midterms and finals. I feel bad for those who have little to no chemistry experience coming into this class, because Prof. Kavner expects us to understand a lot of fundamentals already, given that it's a general chemistry course.

However, the only reason you should take this class would be because of her grading scheme. It is very manageable to get an A, as the midterms themselves were doable if you did well in AP Chemistry. I will say the final was a bit difficult, but in depth studying should do the trick.
30% homework
20% participation quizzes (accuracy does not matter)
25% split over 2 midterms
25% final
10% extra credit - online textbook assignments
An A was a 95+.

I HIGHLY recommend going to TA office hours and collaborating with peers on the homework. That is the only way I succeeded in this class. Prepare to be stressed.

This class was extremely unorganized and I did not learn much. If you have AP Chem credit to skip this course, DO IT. I thought I should take it to make sure I understood everything and that it would be an easy A, neither of those things were true.

The final was also horrendous. There was a computational mcq with NO right answer that I spent a good 45 minutes crashing out over (they never even told us there was a mistake on the exam), and the rest of the exam was also just stuff that we had never learned.