Huiling is incredibly organized and accommodating. Every lecture recording was posted promptly, blank lecture notes were posted long before class, and annotated lecture notes were always available after class. If she made an error on the lecture notes in class, she alerted us that corrections were available and would often take that content off the midterm because she thought it would be unfair to test us on something that wasn’t taught clearly. She provided a number of resources for extra help and was always willing to hang around outside the lecture hall after class answering questions. She let us take both midterms and the final open note because she wanted us to be able to show comprehension, not memorization. She also always had a cool outfit. Highly recommend her class!

strong care for the well-being of students, strongly recommended!

The content of this class is tough (isn't super similar to AP Chemistry and deals a lot more with quantum mechanics/chemistry) but Shao has a very generous grading scheme to make up for it. First, she implements a scale where 90-100 is an A, 85-89 is an A-, 80-84 is a B+, ... , and so on until needing only a 55 to pass the class. Exam averages were low (around the 70s range), mostly due to needing to work through them quickly, but all in all are similar to her discussion worksheets and "expectation problems." She doesn't curve given her scaling, and exams are not weighed as much compared to other classes. Discussion worksheets and homework account for 50% of your grade, and for homework you are given 10 attempts per question. That leaves 15% for each midterm and 20% for the final. Given it was her first time teaching, her lectures were a lot and sometimes disorganized, but she is a kind, generous person and truly wants to help students learn (I heard she is also much more helpful in office hours). All in all, her lenient grading is a great reason to take Professor Shao's class, and she's also a decent teacher and overall just super nice person.

I took this as an EE major and it wasn't bad. There's a lot of people in the class so your TA sometimes can't respond to your emails fast. There were two midterms and they were weighted 15% each so it wasn't bad plus it was online with 90 min time limit on gradescope. The biggest chunk of your grade comes from the discussion worksheets and if you go to the discussions, it's a free 30% of your grade. Honestly the biggest reason why I didn't get an A in this class was I overslept my discussion as it was at 8am, but if you go to those, you're good. Lectures are recorded and uploaded on bruinlearn or youtube. She has annotated notes uploaded. Honestly, Shao said the class was kind of difficult but it was fairly manageable. Even though she says homework takes an average of 8 hours to do, it only took me 2 hours on average. It gives you 10 tries to do a question and you never need more than 3 tries. She starts off with quantum mechanics, but since there is no calculus involved in this class, it was pretty easy. Try to take Chem 20A with Shao if you can.

I genuinely swore I was going to fail this class. I bombed the first midterm after studying for two weeks before it. THE TESTS ARE HARD. Nearly impossible. But somehow you make it out alive because if you utilize this outstanding professor the seemingly impossible material will start to make sense.

The homework takes a lot of time but is entirely manageable if you make time for it. That is what saves your grade. Take this class its worth it.

I took this as an EE major and it wasn't bad. There's a lot of people in the class so your TA sometimes can't respond to your emails fast. There were two midterms and they were weighted 15% each so it wasn't bad plus it was online with 90 min time limit on gradescope. The biggest chunk of your grade comes from the discussion worksheets and if you go to the discussions, it's a free 30% of your grade. Honestly the biggest reason why I didn't get an A in this class was I overslept my discussion as it was at 8am, but if you go to those, you're good. Lectures are recorded and uploaded on bruinlearn or youtube. She has annotated notes uploaded. Honestly, Shao said the class was kind of difficult but it was fairly manageable. Even though she says homework takes an average of 8 hours to do, it only took me 2 hours on average. It gives you 10 tries to do a question and you never need more than 3 tries. She starts off with quantum mechanics, but since there is no calculus involved in this class, it was pretty easy. Try to take Chem 20A with Shao if you can.