LS23L is actually an interesting and engaging course. First off, here is the breakdown of how the course runs:

There are 10 three-hour labs throughout the quarter. For these labs, there are pre-lab, in-lab, and post-lab quizzes that are definitely doable as long as you skim through the lab manual before the class. During the labs, you are placed into groups of three to work together on the lab assignment, which includes actually carrying out whatever activity is chosen for that week and filling in either a group or individual worksheet that gets turned in at the end of the class. All of these are easy points that should buffer your grade.

There are also three CPR (writing) assignments worth different amount of points. This is where you write either a specific portion or the entirety of a scientific paper based on experiments conducted during lab. These assignments are actually peer-graded, and so as long as you follow the rubric guidelines and have good/fair reviewers, you should get an A or B on most of your assignments. That being said, if you feel like the grade you received does not accurately reflect your performance, you can contact the CPR coordinator or the professor himself who is surprisingly very receptive to concerns as long as they are legitimate. Go through the CPR coordinator FIRST and then the professor if the issue does not get solved the first time around.

Lastly, the final. I spent one day studying for the final (actually the day before), skimming through the lab manual, jotting down main points of each lab, and looking through all the quizzes I took. They also release a practice final, which is similar to the actual test you will take. Make sure to practice through those and you will be fine.

This is a cool course (maybe this is the nerdy side of me speaking) but the lab activities are not too difficult/actually fun and you get to work in a small group setting, which should make you feel at ease because there are people around you who can help you and you can socialize with. So look forward to taking this course and try to enjoy it as much as you can!

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Professor/Lectures - Professor Pfluegl's lectures are all online, so I actually ended up never seeing him in person. If I remember correctly, the link to the lectures are posted every week on CCLE, but the online lectures are on his separate ls23l website, too. His accent is a little hard to understand, but there are subtitles and you can adjust the speed as preferred, as well.

Grading system (in LS 1) - Total: 500 points (I think the score distributions might be different each quarter, so I'll try not to add them, because there might be some confusion).
**Straight scale grading (might normalize to account for different sections)

Online Quizzes - Consists of pre-lab quizzes and post-lab quizzes that are 5 multiple choice questions based on accuracy. These were pretty simple with only a few detailed questions at times. Your lowest pre-lab quiz and post-lab quiz will be dropped for the quarter. I think 2 or 3 of the "quizzes" are courselets, which were based on completion for my quarter. Courselets were an interactive way to really understand the concepts behind some of the labs.

Discussion/Participation - You have to speak in front of the class about one of the conceptual questions you are assigned to. I remember some people in my class gave really short presentations, so the TA told everyone to try to make 1-2 minute presentations. You might want to confirm with your TA about the time when you decide to present. These were only 6 points out of the 500 points for my quarter, but not getting every point could be a grade-breaker. Participation is basically filling out the evaluations at the end of the quarter.

Exams - There is only one major test and that is a one-hour final 40 questions long. They also gave a sample exam that you could take up to three times. The final was mostly based on the pre-lab quizzes and post-lab quizzes, so make sure to study those. Maybe, if you have time to, try to skim through the entire lab manual and really understand why you're using a certain chemical, so on so on. I think conceptual understanding helped me way better than rote memorization.

Textbook - For this class, the lab manual is all that matters. I think it was $30 at the UCLA store, which I think is pretty fair. You definitely need this in order to the labs correctly and prepare for the pre-lab quizzes and post-lab quizzes.

In-Lab Quizzes and Assignments - Like the online quizzes, in-lab quizzes are also based on accuracy and worth 5 points for almost every lab. Your lowest in-lab quiz score is dropped, as well. These were pretty straightforward multiple choice questions, much like the pre-lab quizzes.
The assignments are worksheets based on "accuracy," but you have (at most) 2 other group members and a whole class (my group would sometimes ask around about some of the questions) to figure out what's up. If no one in your group or class understands, you can also ask the TA (which we also did a lot). Most of the time, it's completion-based, except for the occasional -0.5 or -1 for REALLY incorrect answers (thus the air quotes). I thought having a good lab group was definitely important because slacking off definitely doesn't help you with filling out the worksheet. Make sure to read the lab manual beforehand. Also, the rat dissection lab and the histology lab were the only two labs that were based on actual accuracy (the rat dissection lab, especially, was definitely quiz-style). You work with your lab group for all worksheets (except for Lab J, which is an online "lab").

CPR Assignments - This is the notorious CPR assignment that many people don't like, not only because of its strictness (the calibrations are pass or fail for each of the 3 calibrations, you can re-do them once if you don't get the points the first time) but because your grade is dependent on your classmates, for the most part. I think you can complain to the professor about a lousy grader, but I heard that regrades were pretty strict. Be sure to follow the rubric, and read the prompts carefully when your grading other people's essays, too!

Okay, real talk here. This class is very manageable, even though 3 hour labs in themselves can be tedious/frustrating, especially because the LS department doesn't let students leave labs more than 10 minutes early. But that being said, these labs can be quite interesting and engaging, far more than Chem 14BL. I mean, you can figure out your maternal ancestry/haplogroup, dissect a rat, and generally get real/applicable information. It's straightforward, it's helpful, and if you actually like LS, it should be relatively engaging. What's not to like?

I will echo what someone said in the past that you can BS the hell out of this class. Online lectures are honestly skippable. In-lab quizzes are taken from the same pool of questions as pre-lab questions that they haven't changed for years, which can virtually all be found on Quizlet (there was literally one, maybe two exceptions I noticed over the quarter because they started calling chloroform PopCulture and changed a question about that but you can drop one quiz each from in-labs, pre-labs, and post-labs so it didn't even affect me).

They tell you everything you need to know for the class and the labs while you're in-lab, so you can skim or even skip on reading the lab manual if you're desperate and just bug your Lab Assistants to help you out if need be. The only labs that could be helpful to prepare for are the rat dissection (which has a group quiz) and histology lab - they will want you to identify slides using educated guesses. Honestly, you should just memorize what they look like before lab and give explanations after the fact, especially if you have a terrible/uncooperative group. Then when you finish early, you can chill and work on other work.

So basically, from your quiz points, you should get 100% or near 100%. In-lab work you may lose a point or two sometimes, but it should be pretty insignificant as long as you follow directions. There will be freebie points too from evaluations and one discussion question that you'll take 2-3 minutes max to answer once over the quarter.

This leaves CPR and the final.

Dear god, do not assume that you'll get nice reviewers and that we'll all help each other out. People gave me 6s and 7s (out of 10) for nitpicky stuff even though an 8 or even 9 would have been very reasonable. Check Piazza for info, be clear in your hypothesis (distinguish the two groups being tested if it's people, be clear about the variable you're testing. If it's cardiorespiratory rate, don't say something vague like "physical fitness,") Don't give excessive detail for materials/methods in lab reports (assume people will know basic techniques and don't include locations of stuff that are specific to our LS23L lab rooms), use only like 2 graphs for summarizing data and do NOT give individual trial data or interpret the data in the Data section. Understand what paired vs unpaired t-test is, because you should specify this in the lab report. Make sure things are in the right sections, which will be clear in the rubric they give you. Then you should be getting 8-10s in your lab reports, and if there's a problem, complain to the LS23L department but be aware that they may lower the grade.

If you do this, you can finesse the final and get an A with ease. Check quizlet for practice final questions which will genuinely be very similar to the actual final. The lectures Pfluegl gives are actually too detailed oftentimes and they won't really test on that stuff so specifically. *Read the Lab Manual* and know details from there, though. If you check quizlet, you'll start to see patterns in how they ask questions. There are a couple major topics from each lab and they basically ask the same variant of question, so if you get the background idea, you'll be able to do the final. Remember lab procedures and the meaning of what certain instruments measure, too.

Not too tricky, but do not underestimate. I never understood what I was doing while doing the labs, but I caught up on everything the day before the final and I was fine.

If you do everything I say, you should have lost very few points by the time the final comes, so you won't even need a high score for an A. I did mehhh on one CPR, and I still had 22 points to spare for the final, meaning I could miss 8 questions out of 40 (2.5 points each) and still get an A.

OVERALL:
Pre-Lab Quiz: 40/40 (drop 1)
In-Lab Quiz: 40/40 (drop 1)
Post-Lab Quiz: 18/18 (drop 1)
Lab Safety Quiz: 15/15 (up to 3 tries, take best attempt)
In-Lab Assignments: 106/110
CPR Assignments: 156.226/165)
(#1: 18.496/20
#2: 54.6/60
#3: 83.13/85)
Final: 87.5/100
Discussion question: 6/6
Evaluations: 6/6
TOTAL: 474.726/500 or ~94.9%

Grade: A, minimum 465/500 or 93% needed for A

Good luck!!

Even though it’s all busy work, you get all these easy points. The only slightly difficult things about this class were writing CPR reports and then the final.

The most difficult part of the class are the reports. Just try to have a very specific Hypothesis for the experiments.
Don't forget to follow the direction of the writing (given). Write the report as if a third person has done the experiment and you were watching the experiment.
Do not forget to include units for your data. Basically for all the numbers in your report there should be a unit. Try to write down the appropriate Unit during the experiment in your labbook.
Learn the general idea of one tail and two tailed t-test statistics.
I'll update this review to more specific guidelines soon.

LS 23L is pretty easy although it's one of the more annoying labs because everything feels tedious and purposefully drawn out. TAs will not let you out of lab early which will rarely happen because it feels like the labs are designed to maximize your time in lab for no real reason.

Workload is pretty light. You have a pre, in lab, and post quiz for every lab, three major lab reports, and a research proposal. They're all easy it's just that the TA can be really picky and take points off. I didn't do amazing on the lab reports but I still managed to get an A in the class. I would not underestimate the final. People say it's really easy and while they aren't wrong it can be tricky.

Don't underestimate the final exam but overall fairly easy class. It is a lot of busy work and writing lab reports takes forever but on other weeks you only have to take the brief quizzes and just go to class so I guess it evens out in the end. Befriend your TA because they, solely, determine your grade.

Honestly Pfleugl was such a non-factor, you never really need to watch the lectures to do well and understand what's happening. Would recommend stocking up on as many past quizzes, quizlets, etc. as possible so you can make sure to get all of your quizzes 100% correct, especially the in-class ones so it can be a great buffer for the lab reports which are kind of time-consuming. My TA was Maria and she is literally one of the best science TA's I've had. This class was actually pretty enjoyable, ESPECIALLY in comparison to Chem 14BL which I hated. The rat dissection was super cool, as well as the histology and infectious disease labs.

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