This is both a review, and also a survival guide for Carlas class with everything I wish I had known prior to the class. The course is not necessarily difficult but is very dense in material which is especially difficult to manage with other upper division courses. Carlas lectures are scattered and disorganized, making it very difficult to learn and apply the knowledge. Everyone failed the first midterm (average a 64) and she blamed it on our study habits, not her own INABILITY to relay the information. The way she talks is simply painful to listen to as she talks in scattered sentences. Her handwriting is far from legible, so you'll want to go back and listen to the bruin cast to take your own notes. She told our class we did not need to memorize certain concepts/pathways for the midterm (methionine pathway... just memorize it you'll thank me later) and put them on the midterm anyways (so you cant trust anything she says ). The only way to survive Carlas portion of the class is to memorize everything, even the stuff she says not to memorize. Go to office hours and try to listen through the pain, she might give away some test pointers. I am very frustrated with her as a professor and her TAs who also are disorganized. You are better off self teaching if you have the self discipline required.

Blames students for poor grades when she can't do the bare minimum and teach. She reads off of slides and her speaker notes verbatim. No effort is made to engage students, encourage class discussion, nada. Complains she is too busy working on meeting deadlines for grants and such. Pre-records lectures where she still reads slides verbatim. Class time was just Q&A but unhelpful. Unresponsive via email. Smart professor but horrendous teacher. Seems like she is only scouting out grad students for her research lab. Would never take again, highly do not recommend. Average for both midterms was an F. Now I want to change major's.

Literally the most useless professor in the entirety of the biochemistry program for STEM students. Absolutely learned nothing from her as she read slides that were pre-made for our class textbook VERBATIM. Her question sessions during class were repetitive as well and she would then read off slides again trying to explain. The only reason I was able to pass was thanks to my TA and the use of AK lectures online on youtube and other supplemental videos. Not only is Koehler out of your mind boring and hard to pay attention to, she is late on uploading lectures. She additionally uploaded our midterm 40 minutes late, which conflicted with a lot of student's times and schedules as it was only supposed to be a 50 minute exam. Additionally, she offered no compensation for this mistake of hers.

Koehler is also extremely unclear when it comes to specifics of how she is grading the course. She roughly said it would be curved to a B/B- average, and upon a student asking what letter it was curved to, she simply said "it was not a B." Her lack of enthusiasm and conviction to actually TEACH the material especially during times of a pandemic and online schooling only made learning the content even worse. Sure, yeah, she definitely knows her content but she doesn't have that conviction to actually teach it to her students. Her lectures were un-interactive, stale, plain white powerpoints, and she would droll on in the most monotone voice ever. Think of how the adults sound in Charlie Brown, that's what it came off to me as.

AK Lectures with a 15 minute video taught me more than she ever could with a prerecorded online lecture of 1+ hours. I could put my trust and rely on my TA, though, which is what saved me in this class. I recommend taking this 153C course with ANYONE but her. I wish I had Gober to teach this class instead. I've never written on BruinWalk but I guess I will now to show how frustrated I am with this class.

Probably the worst professor that teaches the 153 series, by far. I took this class online during the pandemic, and the professor would only read off of her slides word-for-word during pre-recorded lectures. She held Q&A sessions during the scheduled lecture times, but I stopped attending those live as her explanations were not clear and very repetitive of what she had said in the pre-recorded lectures. I'm sure she is really knowledgable about the course material, but her laziness and refusal to explain the core concepts in the class was really sad. Do not take this class with her, you will not learn anything AND you have no idea what you are doing.

Okay, this class was taught by Dr. Koehler and Dr. Gober. Dr. Koehler was pretty much terrible, but Dr. Gober was fantastic. Dr. Koehler was really confusing and had a hard time explaining the concepts clearly to students. Honestly, it was a lot more useful to watch AK lecture videos regarding the concepts that Dr. Koehler was suppose to teach. None of her past tests were in the bruin test bank either. Best advice is to the do the worksheets that she posts on CCLE. Dr. Gober, on the other hand, was great. He would tell you what is on his exam (midterm II, final), so you can direct your focus of study on specific concepts. And believe me, there is A LOT of material that's covered. 153A was a piece of cake compared to this class. And the name of the game is to simply memorize. Memorize structures, memorize enyzme names, memorize everything. Didn't even have to crack open the textbook once, just use lecture slides and AK lectures.

I suck at memorizing and this class was hard. Especially for metabolism, there's **********274 different pathways/names/enzymes/fun-facts to memorize and it's easy to drown in the information.
That being said, I pulled off an A because I spent solid hours sitting on my ass and compiling the information in a way that my pathetic brain could digest. Also I made sacrifices to the gods. I had Jasmine as my TA and she was nice enough to make study sheets for students who came to her discussion. There's a lot of resources online and in lehninger/voet about metabolism that I heavily used as well.
Koehler has old tests in the test bank and she very often recycles questions. They range anywhere from regurgitating pathways to carbon labeling. Midterm was tricky and the final mowed me over.
She is a very kind and thoughtful professor, and she holds extremely helpful review session where she tells everyone what to focus on. That being said, I hated her sense of humor and her insistence on making bad trump jokes in the middle of metabolism pathways. She already tends to be scattered and her jokes made it worse. However, if you are a pleb and you think fat trump jokes are funny, tbh power to you this class will be a much better experience.
good luck you need it, have fun maybe, if you don't like Koehler just wait it out for Gober.

She is a bad lecturer, but even a worse grader. She set the average of the class to a D+ because the average on the tests was 45 and 47. She never told us that she will use a different average to set the curves (she set 2 curves - for upper and lower half of class) . Basically, more than 50% of students did not receive a passing grade, because at the end those that didn't do above 50% on her tests did not pass, even though the average of the class was below 50%. If you happen to take her class - make sure you memorize the entire book - must know every pathway out there!

Hands down my favorite class of the entire biochemistry sequence. Dr. Koehler has an interactive lecture style clearly explains the important concepts we need and relates them to real-world examples. You have the opportunity to learn the pathology behind metabolic disease. She actively asked us what topics we were interested in and presented information on them in class. If there is course-related content you are interested in, let her know. Attend office hours and ask questions for anything unclear. Don't be afraid to ask the same question multiple times until it clicks; I did because understanding the concepts is key to success in this class. Also, I want to add that the TAs for my quarter (F23) were graduate students in Dr. Koehler's research group and solidly understood the concepts and could answer basically any question on the material, which has not always been my experience for chem classes at UCLA.

I would highly recommend taking 153C with Dr. Koehler. This is her field of research, and she knows how to explain these concepts, highlighting the most critical pieces of info we need to take away from complex biological processes.

Class Grade Breakdown:

6 weekly team quizzes x 25 pts each (lowest quiz score dropped) = 125 points
Midterm 1 = 50 points
Midterm 2 = 50 points
Final = 200 points
Total Points: 425 points
22 points of extra credit given in our quarter

I'll structure this review in the style of a popular Spaghetti Western: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good: Lots of extra credit points, exams are fair-ish, she provides a HUGE curve at the end of the quarter

The Bad: A LOT OF CONTENT. Lots of pathways, lots of structures - the content in this class is inherently hard . It doesn't help, however, when there is an expectation to memorize an insane amount of stuff each week.

The Ugly: Lectures were pretty disorganized. When I say pretty disorganized, I mean 5th-grade-level slides with a lot of handwritten notes. The speed at which we move through content is insane. TCA + Glycolysis + Gluconeogenesis took up 8 slides and we flicked through them in a solid 8 minutes. It's not always clear what we need to know and in what depth (but at least she tries to clarify). That final was pretty funny. 47% of our grade with a mean of 61% and a high of 87%.

It's a hard class but it is a super fun class content-wise (if you like biochem). Honestly, if you take Koehler just try to stick around the B-range for assignments and you'll come out ok in the end. Definitely don't cram - there's way too much information for one night.

Something you must know about Koehler is that she is incredibly disorganized which can make "learning" this class very difficult. Her handwriting is terrible and because she often projects what she's writing for the class to see if you can't read it you'll have to be going up to her after class after every class to figure out what she meant. Koehler's lectures didn't seem very structured because she would often stop lecturing, throw in a side point, and then continue as if nothing happened. These factors can make surviving in this class difficult.

That said, I am very surprised to say that this class wasn't actually that bad. Koehler's midterms are very fair. Highly recommend doing the practice questions she gives out because they mimic the types of questions you will be seeing on the exams. Office hours and recording the lecturers were also very useful.