Most people didn't do well on the first midterm because we did a lot of practice free response questions during class and discussion, but did better the second midterm because more practice material was given to the TAs who helped during discussion. Midterms were 19 questions, so two questions wrong would already put you at a B+

He was VERY behind schedule. Makes sense because he's not used to the quarter system. Homework was manageable, just stay on top of it. Doing it helps with overall understanding of course material, and isn't graded that harshly.

Pros:
-Toumari is a good professor and listens to student feedback. You can tell that he cares about his students.
-For homework, we use Achieve. It marks you down very little if you get a problem wrong. I liked our homework assignments because you get marked down just enough that it provides you with the incentive to try your best, but not so much that it impacts your overall class grade.
-All exams/quizzes are multiple choice

Cons:
-The class is disorganized. To go into a bit more detail, we weren't able to get through all of the planned material. Homework assignments for each topic were also assigned a week after we learned that topic, but this problem improved throughout the quarter.
-Study resources could be vastly improved upon. We only got a study guide for the final, but having study guides for the midterm as well would have been very helpful. We got no study resources for our first midterm and our TAs helped us review for the second midterm. So, if you decide to take Toumari, try to ask for more study resources if this same problem still occurs.
-Weekly quizzes can have a strong impact on your grade. The quizzes would be more manageable if the time limit was longer, which would make things less stressful for students that tend to work slower or like to work out all the problems. Once, getting 1-2 problems wrong on one of the quizzes brought my overall grade down by over 3%, which can sometimes be enough to change your letter grade depending on where you're at. However, the quizzes are good study resources for exams, especially the final.

I'll go into more detail about the pros/cons above and how things went during Toumari's first quarter and my experience in his class...

Many students say that this class is only manageable for people with a chemistry background. In my case, that’s completely wrong. I took Honors Chemistry my sophomore year and AP Chemistry just last year and got an A in both classes, but this quarter was different. The material in this class is pretty similar to AP Chemistry, and I understood most of the material, which is why I’m both surprised and disappointed that I did worse in this class than I initially expected.

To start off with, the first midterm didn't go well for most of the class and the average was a D, but there was no curve to help compensate for the way that it brought down many people's grades. I personally studied quite a bit for the midterm and went through every single practice problem on the lecture slides, but I still did poorly because the midterm wasn't too cumulative and mostly focused on what we had learned in the most recent lectures. I had watched videos and reviewed problems on the topics covered in recent lectures, but I didn't have a complete understanding of it because for some reason, the homework for it hadn't been assigned yet. In the beginning, homework assignments were being assigned a week after we learned them, which created a problem because we would have no extra practice for what we learned until a week later, but by that time I'd forget what we learned and have to reteach it to myself. Thankfully, Toumari starting publishing the homework assignments at appropriate times later on in the quarter, and hopefully he'll continue to do so in the future. If not, then make sure to ask him because the homework can be a good study/review tool for exams.

Furthermore, we hadn't been given any study guide or resources for the first midterm. The problems I studied from the slides were mostly calculations-based, but the midterm was mostly conceptual. I believe that if we had better study resources for the first midterm and that if the homework had been assigned at better times from early on, many of us would have done better, especially since it was difficult to bounce back from the first midterm. We did receive extra credit chances for a maximum of 1.5% extra credit added to your total grade, but this did little to compensate for the damage that the first midterm did.

The second half of the quarter was much better. I can tell that he cares about his students because he listened to our feedback and responded by giving more extra credit and resources to help us. I think that if Toumari continues to give study guides for exams and has TAs help us review then future students will probably have better experiences than we did. However, I still think that the organization of the class can still be greatly improved upon, especially when it comes to getting through the course material in a timely manner, since we weren't able to get through all of the planned lessons this quarter.

The material itself isn’t difficult, especially if you’ve seen it before. Make sure you have a good understanding of the concepts. The lectures are high-paced which is okay, but he sometimes goes through examples before u get a chance to properly write them down. I think that it would be helpful if he gave students more opportunities to do practice problems in class as he goes through the material. Toumari's office hours are by appointment, but he is very helpful. TAs also have office hours as well, and I suggest that you come prepared with what questions you want to ask since there might be other students there too which can leave you with little time to get the help you need sometimes.

Toumari is still a new prof, so we should cut him some slack. He improved throughout the fall quarter by providing more resources and some extra credit opportunities, but they were not enough to compensate for the way that the midterm ruined so many student’s grades. I think that there is still a lot to be improved upon in this class. Therefore, the issue isn’t with the material or with the professor himself, but rather with disorganization and lack of resources.

Overall, I wouldn't take this class again, but I think that Toumari will probably improve when he teaches later on so keep that in mind if you decide to take this class with him. Good luck!

I did not like this class. I did like Toumari.
I really struggled because this was my first quarter at UCLA and I had the classic "I don't need to study" mindset and ended up with a 47% on the second midterm. The grading scheme was fairly lenient so I ended up with an A-, but the midterm was definitely humbling. Lectures were typically not too bad to follow along with and they were recorded. Weekly quizes/homework online, but we were allowed multiple tries and lost minimal points if we had to retry questions, so it wasn't too bad. There were several times that he shuffled around the grading scheme in response to student complaints and he eventually made the HW worth more and the midterms worth less. (thank god) I took this for Toumari's first quarter teaching at UCLA, so I'd imagine future quarters have been/will be smoother. With that said, this class is what made me decide to no longer be premed lol.

A lot of people complained about this class, but I liked it well enough. I had only taken Honors Chem back in high school, and I found the course to be doable if you paid attention to his lectures, go to discussion, and go over the examples and homework. That being said, I do think you should have a decent chem background to do well.
Lectures -- not mandatory and are Bruincasted.
Exams (2 midterms + 1 final) -- all multiple-choice; doable if you paid attention and practiced beforehand
Homework -- graded based on accuracy, but it subtracted only 5% for each wrong answer for each question (i.e.: If there were 20 questions in an assignment and one of the your attempts for a question was wrong, you lost only (0.05)(1/20) = 0.25% of the total assignment), so it was very easy to get at least a 98% on each assignment.
Prof Toumari was kinda disorganized in the beginning (which is understandable because it's his first time in the quarter system), although he got better with feedback and was very accommodating and approachable. He ended up boosting our grades with extra credit, extending deadlines, and changed the grading scheme halfway through. His dry sense of humor was also very funny.
I didn't really read the textbook, although I did watch a few youtube videos and asked my TA questions for clarification.