With the slightest of caution, I entered the zoom. So far so good, this material I knew. I was doing pretty good until I wondered where’s the slides? No slides but notes, and drawings as a guide. It wasn’t too hard, 4 mechanisms being explained, but that midterm was a level 100 boss to my campaign. 70% the average she said, just try harder next time so get it in your head. The premed’s they fought and in the GroupMe they wept, this woman Reilly will tear you to shreds.

She SN2’d my ass to the point where I stopped going to class. She hit me from the back like a backside attack, and man o man yeah that was pretty wack. After the 1st midterm, the diction became gobbledygook, confusing the class and each chapter got me shook. I did my best, flashcards and such, I lay restless from studying with the grass that I touch.

Memorize she said and try not to get lazy, she spent a great deal in class lecturing about Kacey. And editing all day on the day of the exam, Reilly is unorganized when we’re all going ham. The missing of tardy posts and to the students’ demise, no surprise she will ignore all of your cries. And now I sit in silence with my 30 sum percent, it’s that time of the year, I give up Reilly for Lent.

This is the Dark Souls of UCLA pre-med classes. Get good at note taking and memorizing reactions or prepare to die like I have.

This class is an absolute shitshow. Don't take it with Reilly for your own sanity! She makes the exams 1000x more difficult than the practice problems she gives you, and then she blames YOU and your study strategies for poor class averages such as our 69 on MT1 and 57 for MT2. Like okay, a majority of your 600+ students failed yet there must be something wrong with the way that all of us studied. Maybe acknowledge that you're the problem? She's also very unreliable in terms of doing things when she says she'll do them; it's rare for her to post practice problems/exams/notes/Gradescope submission slots, etc. on the day that she says she will.
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Some other areas of concern:

1. Practice problems: You could spend hours and hours studying the practice problems & lecture notes she provides and still fail because her exams in no way resemble these materials.
2. Answer keys: Again, these are never posted on time. Plus they ALWAYS have mistakes so they're not helpful to your learning and just add to the stress of this class.
3. Practice exams: She gives them to you less than 24 hours before the midterm so there's no time to really study them + they are way easier than her actual exams.
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Also, she tends to deliberately ignore comments/emails that call her out on her bs or ask about extra credit opportunities, etc. She doesn't care about her students at all, yet she tries to play the nice guy after the exams by giving you study tips, which is just condescending as hell.
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Don't take this class with her!

Do not take this class with her!!!! 14D is difficult to begin with and this woman makes it worse. It's incredibly frustrating to learn when her answer keys are wrong. In MT1 there were "practice exam answer key", "correction to answer key", AND "correction to corrections". In lectures she always promise to send an email about something but they very seldom arrive on time. This quarter she combined Lec1 and Lec2 together. Each time she didn't get to go over something in one lecture, she points you to the recording of the other lecture. If only she could care more about teaching instead of showing pictures of her dogs.....

if i could kidnap her dog i would... do not take this class with amber. this is the worst class i've ever taken at UCLA. she lectures as fast as i drive on the i-10 when there are no cops around, and often it's about things that aren't on the exams or her dog. if you're wondering why we're all so concerned about exams... 75% of our grades are exams, 25 for each midterm/final. when she found out the average was a 57ish on the second midterm, she took half the lecture saying "how can i help you guys?" like we were the ones at fault... maybe make the tests easier? maybe stay on track during lecture and have what you teach actually correspond with what you put on the exams? i'm writing this review because she is throwing out "lollipops with serial numbers that you cash in for extra credit" during lecture today... putting a bandaid on the wound that she inflicted. i know she's doing that bc no one is coming to lecture/participating because we're all braindead-and i don't go to lecture either, it's impossible to keep up without pausing to reevaluate if what she just said correlates with what we're going to have to know or not, or if it's just bs. she tries to compensate for her shitty lectures with having hella office hours but some of us have other things to do... like regain our mental sanity outside of ochem.... i really think she should stop being a lecturer and maybe idk start a soundcloud drop some beats about... chemistry or something with how fast she talks...

unless you want to fail every midterm + get behind on content looking at her dog pics, i advise against this class ♡

You know, at first I believed her dog was the one redeeming quality of this class. Now whenever I look at it, I'm filled with mild infuriation.

This course was extremely messy. Ochem is already a bitch to get through but Reilly just makes it more difficult than necessary. The lack of clarification and on-time messages made it difficult for anyone to understand what was going on and we had to rely on each other to figure out the logistics of the course. I understand there's a lot of material to cover, but anything gone over during lecture is done so fast without proper explanation, you just end up leaving lecture with an empty brain. I'm the type of person who likes in-person classes bc it helps me with focusing, but this just discouraged me from going to lecture at all. The exams are another demon. When most of the class is trying hard and studying, but still gets a very low average on exams-- you're probably doing something wrong. I know it's like this for every other course-- prof posts practice problems that are basic and have harder ones on the exams. But the difference in difficulty between practice and exams was actually mind-boggling (not to mention the lack of time). I did everything she recommended-- flashcards, summary sheets, review sessions, practice tests-- and still came out of that midterm acknowledging that I failed it in the most spectacular way. (It doesn't exactly matter much that you're letting us drop a midterm if you're going to write unfair exams). Also the fact that her "answer keys" need constant correction? Red flag. TLDR; assignments and submission links aren't posted on time despite her stating it'd be "posted tonight", answer keys are constantly in need of corrections, responses on campuswire and emails are close to none, and so on and so forth. Don't waste your time.

And I thought Lannan was messy.

Dr. Reilly has set the bar soooooo low that it is serving liquor in hell. Goodness gracious, I have never been more confused in my entire life. Everything is unorganized and chaotic. This class really hit rock bottom and decided it needed a basement. Unless you want to suffer, I recommend not taking this class with Reilly.

I’ve never had a professor that is this messy before. Reilly put out the second practice midterm the night before the midterm. She also admitted to writing her tests literally hours before we took them, which doesn’t allow TAs help students properly. Plus the class is extremely difficult compared to 14C, so it’s really unfair for the prof to act this way.

Reilly writes ridiculously hard exams. She covers SO much in lectures that even if you write everything down you just can't possibly remember everything. As someone whose performance is average in chemistry, Chem 14A/B/BL/C/CL are a complete joke compared to how hard Chem 14D is. I would always walk out of lecture feeling so lost with how much information was covered. I finally decided to read the textbook and I was saved, everything makes so much more sense. I recommend you read the textbook and do the problems because they are good challenge problems to practice.