Prof Ow is pretty cool. His lecture is very well organized and concise. His exams are pretty much straightforward from his notes and practice exams. He curves the average to B/B-, which looks good. My only complaint is that he sometimes does not explain the concepts in detail if you don't ask him. If you put some efforts, definitely you can get an A. Highly Recommended.

EASY TO CHEAT IN THIS CLASS!

Take it, easiest chem upper division class, such a fucking easy professor, a joke! :D

He shouldnt give only one midterm and one final. Too much material. I would gladly be studying for two midterms instead of one. Not fair. Plus material is hard. I have to figure stuff out by myself. He stresses out every week when the midterm is coming and its just puts more stress on me. I have had much better teachers before.

I received an A in the class NO FUCKS GIVEN.

Definitely doable class... if you have the time to study a lot for it. Take another upper division Chemistry class!

And continuing my rambling about the nature of the course and its grading, the poster who says the class is a joke, based his review mostly on the midterm. and maybe the final which again I thought was fair. professors can and do read these bruinwalk reviews too. maybe the first poster's condescending review might have lead to such a bad scale that caused suffering for many. after all dr ow seemed to emphasize how much he cared about students reviewing him as a professor and reminded us several times to submit official evals to the office of instructional development. but official reviews are withheld until grades are given out, but this poster just had to post his review before any grades were assigned (grades assigned on 3/24/14 or 3/25/14).

Not very much material in the class compared to something like the 153 classes, but the material is scattered and you will spend a lot of time trying to figure out the material and what is expected of you. midterm was easy since he followed his study guide and taught us how to draw mol orbitals. the avg 70, median 85 but since its a small class with a skewed distribution you can see it was hit or miss for people. After this midterm though he moved kind of fast and was confusing jumping between writing on overhead slides and writing on outlines. i guess the final exam had an average of 60 from the poster below and looks like he straight scaled the grades for 93+=A and 90-92=A- since I thought I would get an A based on my midterm and how I felt about the final but got an A- instead. Btw the final covered mostly lecture notes with both key and obscure parts of lecture playing an important role for the final; I could see some people leaving early but many people faces had expressions of struggle and helpless surprise. Overall take this professor only if you feel comfortable resting your entire grade on a single 33% midterm and 67% final. Thats right no second midterm quizzes or hw sets to reduce the final exam weight or help you if you mess up. And richard kaner, not maynard (organic chem professor) like the 2 posts below, teaches this class in the fall. kaner might be harder but at least he curves the average to a B like typical upper div professors not B- like dr. ow. while the material was interesting I am still bitter about the grading scale since it hurt my gpa too (and I have a feeling some students who do not stellar but above average in other science classes did not pass and will have to repeat the course or find another elective). maybe its his last time teaching 171, since I know he doesnt teach at ucla very often. again he is a hit or miss for most people, unlike some other professors who always get praise.

I don't think the below comment was very accurate. Just because you got a bad grade doesn't mean the course materil is useless. It's an elective for biochemistry and you only have to take one class. If you are so bitter about it, then you shouldn't have taken it and swtiched to other chemistry electives. I am not a chemistry major but I found the class material very interesting. Dr. Ow tends to go slow but make things really clear during the class. But you definitely need to do a lot of problems to really understand the concept. The midterm was ridiculously easy but I bombed it. The final was chanllenging but doable. It wasn't an easy class per se but neither a hard one. You just have to reallly understand the concepts.

Grade: B-

My UCLA GPA is 3.83, this class was the most useless class (for biochem majors). You learn irrelevant information like Molecular orbital theory of metals, and semiconductors that you will not use the rest of your life. Prof. OW has extremely hard tests (avg. 60%) and curves to a B-. I would take it with Prof. Maynard, who won the Chem teacher award! But, Dr. OW is cute.......

Lots of studying and challenging professor! Take with Maynard!