Took during COVID (Online)

It is MUCH easier as of writing this review and she is VERY accommodating as to what is going on and really helped us out on the tests. Midterms were OPEN NOTES and COLLABORATION ENCOURAGED! This meant that midterms were not difficult at all and the final was optional with midterms being weighted more. They were also given over a day period with final over 2 day period. The rubric she uses is her old one which is done in person so it may change to accommodate rampant grade inflation as a high majority of the class was getting an A (70% at least).

Tutoring for this class! I did well and Tienson wrote me a LOR. Email me at ************* if you're interested.

Most of the reviews here are accurate. Here's my 2 cents though. Although the class is difficult, it is most definitely survivable if you try from the get go. Beware of the pacing though, 4 lectures a week could be really draining. Somehow also she ends up being behind of her own schedule as well, so be prepared to learn something on the last lecture before the exam (e.g. Friday lecture and Sunday Final). Learning ahead is a good idea.

Problem Sets: Be sure to do the problem sets as they come out, as they resemble the same caliber of questions you will see on the exam for the most part. Pay attention to what she expects from your answer -- you have to be that specific and thorough.

Quizzes/Hw: Also, there were 7 quizzes (some in class and some online), but these should be "easy" points for the most part. It is all just memorization, so be sure to ace these to give yourself more room for error during exams. There is also a homework assignment worth about 30 points. Try not to underestimate the assignment and lose points on it either, as this can also help to cushion your grade.

Extra credit: Her point scale in the class is adjusted, curving it a little. She also does have extra credit opportunities sprinkled throughout the quarter which helps, such as the "This Quarter in Biochemistry" assignment where you find a current research article relating to the topics of the class. Also, there were always +3 free points on each exam from just writing your name and a fun fact question.

Exams: They were tough, but they're not impossible. Just study the problem sets, and the logic behind the answer key. Be thorough and fast for the midterms. There's less time pressure on the final.

Point Breakdown:
MT 1 - 91/100
MT 2 - 86 /100
Final - 178/200
5 Quizzes - 100/100
HW Assignment - 29/30
Clicker - 25/25
Extra Credit - not sure, but I did do all of them
Total 509/550
Grade: A (range was 460-550)

I don't know why everyone hates Tienson so much. I think her exams were fair. As long as you do all the study questions, you should be well prepared for them. Although the class is indeed a lot of material, the important points of the class are often repeated over and over again. I took notes in the class and reread them which helps because then I can get down all the information first and later make sure I understand it all. It also helps to compare notes with a friend to make sure you didn't miss anything, but she also does post her slides.

I'm just going into my 3rd year at UCLA and Biochem with Tienson was the probably the hardest class I have personally ever taken at UCLA thus far. However, I don't feel this is Heather's fault as much as the timing and pace of the class is when you are in the quarter system and taking other difficult classes. I found the best way to study for this class was to DO! THE! STUDY! QUESTIONS! Learn how she wanted you to explain concepts using the answer keys for the study questions, she doesn't necessarily look for key words but she DOES look for key concepts to be applied, and these are very useful. I wasted so much time making notes before seeing there were 20 pages of study questions per week I didn't go through until the night before the exam, big mistake (at least I learned for the final).

HW: not assigned homework except for the protein structure assignment, so if you don't have a good work/study ethic (like me), don't worry, you will develop one. Study questions are the best tool! I only learned this after receiving my first midterm though.

Quizzes: She gives many quizzes (I think 5 total?) every week or 2 that in the long run helped me retain the information for the final (though it was a lot of studying per week).

Exams: If you are concerned about your grade like I was, just know that I got a C- on both midterms (exactly at the median), but I scored above the median on the final (about 15 points, but still got a C+), but this allowed me to get an A- in the class (which I was surprisingly happy with given how difficult I found the class). Make sure to carefully check the grading on your exams too...I submitted granted regrade requests for about 4 points on the exam, which may have affected my grade a lot.

Grading: She gives out the point ranges on the syllabus and she will be strict about these points ranges. Always aim to earn the maximum amount of points you can on ANY assignment. They matter if you care about your final grade in the class.

Extra credit: She does end up giving a lot more extra credit than I have seen chemistry professors give (don't rely on it though).

Get your hands on practice exams and study the hell out of the study questions. Don't study your lecture notes too much. Fun class but a really tough one! Tienson is a fair professor and I like her but she'll work you hard.

Honestly, take this class with Gober (teaches in Spring usually) or Awad if she teaches again. I always felt as though I was in constant stress because of this class when Awad's class was getting higher test averages. I do not consider myself a bad student, and reading off other reviews, I always thought this class would be difficult but manageable to get an A, but I was wrong. I spent a lot of my time preparing for her tests and not once ever hit above an 82, and I know a lot of my peers felt the same. It seems as though she changed up her tests quite a bit from the previous quarters, but the same nit picky key words / phrases in the answer key remained the same. However, if you must take Tienson, make sure you know the answers to the study questions inside and out (although the questions from the midterms are much more difficult, their answers are phrased like how they are in the study questions). I definitely recommend going over bruincasts whenever you need to since she tends to rush over important information due to time crunches. I managed to pull a B+ by scoring above average on every test, getting a 27/30 on pymol, getting 100s on all quizzes along with attendance and doing every extra credit. Try to get your hands on some old exams, preferably the gradescope exams. I felt as though those were more similar to her current testing style. The exam averages for this quarter were 69/100 for midterm 1, 73/100 for midterm 2 and 129/200 for the final. She did not change her grading scheme during my quarter and it seemed as though she offered less extra credit (she did not even go over the TQIB papers because we were behind). Her curve is honestly quite generous, but Gober and Awad are better professors and give more As. Would I take this class again with her? No, but the material was very interesting.

Tiensons class is a joke. Basically, she'll use slides to lecture, and post them online as well. Slides are very little detailed. She has study questions for every week and answers to those. Those are similar to the midterms and final. However, they are a level 4 while the midterms and final are like a level 10. Also, she uses gradescope to grade everything and doesn't give the points on a question if the answer isn't the same as what she wants. She doesn't do partial credit on the exam. It is either like her answer or no points. That is one thing that made me lose so many points on exams because it didn't have the same words she was looking for.

Grade Breakdown from Fall 18 Syllabus:
• 20 clicker points: down from 25, because of an issue I’ll talk about later in this review
• 30 PyMol points: assignment out of 30, 2 extra credit points possible
• 100 quiz points: most of the quizzes are literally word for word memorization, even though she tells you she tries to make biochem not about memorization (ALSO THE PREASSESSMENT QUIZ IS EXTRA CREDIT, BUT SHE LATER TELLS YOU IT ONLY COUNTS TOWARDS QUIZZES, SUPER MISLEADING)
• 200 midterm points: 2 midterms, 100 points each (average for first midterm was 69% and MEDIAN for second midterm was 73% - she didn’t give us the mean for the second midterm for some reason, let’s just call it the unique Tienson logic)
• 200 final points: average was ~67%
• 8-12 points of extra credit possible: some are super easy, and some require a ton of work for the points (I’m looking at you This Quarter in Biochem)

Grade Ranges from Fall 18 Syllabus:
• A: 555-460 (~82.8% to be in the A range)
• B: 459-390
• C: 389-320
• D: 319-200
• F: 199-0
*Note that the scale was cut off by 5 points because clicker points were reduced to 20 from 25*

Where is the cutoff for an A- or a B+ or a B- etc.? She decides at the end of the quarter what points get what grade, which might be stressful to some, but that’s how the quarter system rolls, I guess. Now anyone who says she has a generous curve at the end and all that stuff, forget about that. We got these grade ranges from day 1, and they never changed. IGNORE PREVIOUS REVIEWS ABOUT CURVING AT THE END OF CLASS. Now I know that having 83% for an A- is a curve in itself, but do not rely on being curved more at the end.

The average of the class was 418 points which is in the middle of the B range

Now that I’m done with the nice portion, let’s get into the juicy review:

Everyone has probably told you how annoying 153A with Tienson is. They are not wrong. Where do I start? Does she really know her chemistry? I honestly don’t think so. Does she have her own twisted version of chemistry? Definitely. The worst part is she wants you to memorize her version of chemistry word-for-word.
As a result, SHE LITERALLY SPENDS THE FIRST MONTH DOING GENERAL CHEMISTRY REVIEW, BUT SHE TURNS IT INTO TIENSON CHEMISTRY, WHICH IS SO FRUSTRATING. You have to MEMORIZE her definition of things, or else you will lose points on the midterm. You are NOT ALLOWED to use calculators on the midterm to answer buffer questions. Or to carry out division and multiplication. You need to be good at mental math. Yeah, mental math is a hidden requirement of Chem 153A with Tienson. Get ready to have a super narrow concept of enthalpy, entropy, buffers, equilibrium, and bonding memorized. It is so frustrating.

Tienson will fall behind on the first few weeks of material, because she is so bad at explaining chemistry, and as a result gets a lot of questions, which she is bad at answering. You cannot argue with her about a concept in chemistry, because she refuses to accept any viewpoint other than hers. She managed to fall an entire week behind in class, in just 2 weeks. It’s amazing. We fell so behind for the first midterm we had to completely skip a full set of lecture slides. On top of that, she used the review day (2 days before the midterm) to cover material we were tested on. This was not even the worst part, as we had the PyMol assignment (which takes a LONG time to finish) due the same week as the midterm. Overall, Tienson managed the class so badly and it turned into a mess. By the way, did I mention she is unbelievably anal about some explanations on the assignment? For example, she will ask: what is the interaction between these two amino acid residues. If you just answer with what the interaction is, you lose points. SHE WANTS YOU TO EXPAND ON ANSWERS BUT DOESN’T SAY THAT. She has by far the worst wording of questions I have seen on this planet. The absolute worst. Probably worst in the history of UCLA.

After the first midterm, she held a day called Meet your Professor, where she just answered personal questions. That’s fine and cool, but does she not realize how bad at time-management she was for the first midterm?? That ended up hurting the class as we predictably fell behind shortly after that day. Also, due to spending an eternity covering general chemistry concepts, we fell behind and started to rush through the actual difficult material.

Now something unexpected happened during our quarter. Tienson’s father passed away close to Thanksgiving break, so she missed the last 2-3 weeks of the quarter and got a substitute instead. Now keep in mind the substitute (Awad) was lecturing, but Tienson STILL wrote the final. You would expect her to be a little more lenient on the students because of this, but she had no mercy whatsoever. Awad as a lecturer was AMAZING, she was everything that Tienson wasn’t. She was funny, knowledgeable beyond what was written on slides, and she was most importantly engaging. Awad can reliably answer your questions and expand on them, while Tienson’s answer is usually: “that’s the way it is.” Unfortunately, she had a different style of lecturing than Tienson, but we still had Tienson writing our final. Anyways, due to falling behind, we covered some of the most important concepts within the last few weeks of the quarter, and we rushed through them. Our final was on Sunday, and we ended up having lecture on new material 2 days before the final, on Friday. WE NEVER HAD A REVIEW DAY WHATSOEVER FOR ANY EXAMS OR THE FINAL.

Let’s talk about her midterms. The material for the first midterm is honestly not that difficult, so you may wonder why the average was 69%? It’s because her midterms are the absolute worst midterms written on this earth. Her questions are purposely so vague, but she expects such specific answers. It’s literally malicious. Prepare to get docked points off because your graph didn’t start at (0,0) to the micron. Or because you didn’t mention the exact words she wants. Another malicious thing on her midterm is her questions build upon each other. For example, she might ask you to draw an example of an interaction that stabilizes an alpha helix in part A of the question. Then she will ask you to draw that interaction from part A on an alpha helix she gives you. Then later she will ask you to explain the basis of that interaction in part A. Now if you did not manage to get part A correct, you essentially lose like 15 points on the midterm. Perhaps the most annoying part about her midterm rubric is how specific her answer is. Her question is as vague as “justifying what an induced dipole-induced dipole interaction is” and then your answer has to include certain keywords (Tienson buzzwords) such as TRANSIENT PARTIAL dipoles that are caused by ASSYMMETRIC distribution of ELECTRON CLOUD DENSITY around the nucleus. They are also OPPOSITE partial charges, so they are ATTRACTED… some of these ideas seem too trivial to include in the answer, but you will lose points if you don’t include them. Now I can be fine with this and just answer every question in depth, right? Wrong, because she imposes a word limit or a sentence limit on the answer. And she says that run-on sentences count as double. Are we in high school? You get to a point where you have to decide how specific the answer she wants is or else you risk losing points by writing too much or losing points by not writing enough. Her exams largely test your mental math, your attention to annoyingly specific details, your ability to suck up to her and memorize her words, your skill at wording sentences concisely, and your semantics. They barely test your biochemistry knowledge.

The second midterm went a little bit better because there were no more questions about Tienson chemistry. However, there was a 6x6 table with 36 blanks to fill with either + or -. The rubric gave one point for each row and one point for each column. This is by far the worst graded question I have seen in the past few years. If you miss one full row of this table, you think that you got 30/36 answers correct so you should get a good amount of points. However, by missing one row, you lose 1 point for that row, as well as 1 point for every column because you have 1 mistake in each column, so 6 more points. As a result, if you miss 1 row, you get 5/12 points for that question. This is unbelievably stupid, and I cannot understand how she thinks that is fair. Another terrible thing about her second midterm is that we had a huge amount of calculations but were not allowed to use a calculator. Instead she gave us a table full of reciprocals, and we would have to learn to use it. In the year 2018. This is insanely backwards. I was able to use it no problem, but there was a good amount of people who struggled using it. People lost points because their mental math was not good enough. In a biochemistry class. This is not a straightforward reciprocal table, because there were quotients we had to calculate that were not on the table, but we would have to derive them from the table. In my opinion it is extremely unnecessary to waste time doing this during a 50 minute midterm, which people struggle to finish on time.

Now the final was insane. Tienson said we would have to think outside the box for some of those questions. This implies we would need to understand these materials, but we literally covered material 2 days before the final. It was so unlike what we have been learning in lecture with Awad. It was so bad that the large majority of the class stayed all 3 hours. That is all I’m going to say about the final.

With everything said, I think that taking this class with Tienson is extremely time-consuming. You will have to go to discussions and LA sessions in order to grasp the way Tienson wants you to word answers. You are looking at a class that will take up the majority of your time if you want to do well. It is supposed to be a 4 unit class but it feels like a 6 or 7 unit class.

My way of studying for the class involved going over all the bruincasts again and rewriting my notes while listening to them. After that I would go over the answers of the study questions (They are LONG, and I did not have time to actually solve the questions so I just read the answers and tried to understand where she gets them from). There are questions from the practice midterms that definitely have the same exact structure as the exam, so that’s helpful.

Last thing I have to say is please avoid Tienson and take Awad instead. She is way way way better at everything, and her deadlines are WAY more manageable than Tienson. Tienson managed to successfully trim away a few years of my life expectancy because of the frustration this class caused, and that can all be avoided by taking Awad.

** For Awad only***
I took this class with Awad and it went great! I worked really hard for 10 weeks and bruin casted every day. First exam, I got a 67% but second exam I got a 92%. I don't know what I got on the final, but it was very doable! There is so much information in this class and doing past exams, all the study questions, and going to OH is the best way to get an A.

I legit thought it was over when I got a 67% on the first midterm... she's a wonderful professor. She talks fast, but that's why you should bruincast after and pause to really understand what is going on. That being said, extra credit helps, clear professor, and a good course. It's not as hard as everyone makes it seem... You are just on a time crunch! Yay for Awad!