Professor Prado is very sweet and helpful. Her tests are fair, especially because she provides so much practice material (Sapling, pre-class quizzes, practice exams). Although participation counts toward your grade, mandatory participation helps ensure that you do not skip class and that you are understanding the material.

Prado was a great Professor and very fair. She gives out all her precious exams for practice and they are pretty much like the exam in the class. I just did all of the them to study and got an A. Also her discussions are extra credit for the final which works wonders! I think maybe her exams got harder from previous years, but they are still doable. Also her LAs organize workshops and the worksheets there are also helpful!

This class was too easy and did not encourage any critical thinking. It focuses on memorization. The final wasn’t cumulative and you leave the class not remembering anything from the beginning, which made 14D hard.

If you know what you're doing, this class is easy. I would usually only study a day or two before each midterm, and I did fine. Doing lots of practice problems is key; those prepare you for the test the most. She posts old midterms and finals, so there's plenty of practice material. Dr. Prado told us to buy the textbook at the beginning of the year, but I rarely looked at it. I did the readings at first, but it didn't take me long to realize the textbook was useless. Don't do the additional practice problems from the TB either. Focus on old tests, sapling, lecture slides, and clicker questions. Finally, for tests, PAY ATTENTION TO THE DETAILS!! There are so many places where you can lose easy points (not circling conjugated atoms, not drawing in lone pairs, etc). These points really add up, and there's also a bit of a time crunch since the midterms are in class. Practice a lot so that you can work quickly and maintain accuracy.

Loved Professor Prado! She was super helpful and sweet, very approachable. She understands what it's like to be a student and can relate to us. She's so encouraging and explains everything rather well. I was probably .5% away from getting an A- #SAD. But if you have the chance to take Prado, do it! She gives lot of practice problems and tests that are similar to the actual tests.

I enjoyed Prado's class so much! Unlike the reviewer before me, I felt this class was really challenging, as I had no background in organic chemistry at all. Though I struggled to get down the many new concepts, Prado was definitely the best teacher to guide me through them. Her pacing through the material was perfect, and I had time to understand what I was learning through the many Khan Acadmey videos, Sapling homework assignments and readings she posted! She gives super helpful tips that she used as a student, and I still use them in 14D! It is true that this class relies heavily on memorization, but a lot of organic chemistry bases itself in rules that must be memorized. That is just the nature of this course, and as a person who sucks at memorization, I had to practice and practice and practice to get this stuff down! Though 14D is a whole new level as it has to do more with reaction mechanisms, I do feel Prado has given me a solid grasp of the fundamentals necessary to understand and do well in the class. I never knew such a helpful, knowledgeable, and compassionate teacher existed at UCLA!!!

Don't believe the grade distribution! There's no way 22.5% of the class got over 99%. This class is hard! Even though Prado is the clearest lecturer and really helpful, the tests are always a time crunch and you end up missing so many points on small details. I know a lot of my friends are struggling also with the workload that this class gives, as organic chemistry is a ton of practice! The grading scale is really tough too! I expected a grading scale more lenient for organic chemistry, like A- is is 89% to 92.9%, but her current grading scale has A- at a 90%! Like, A+ is 99% and above, which is the highest I've ever heard of and it's killing my overachiever friends! So yeah, I love Prado so much; she's the most helpful teacher you could get for this subject, but the grading scale's way tougher than is shown on this site...I'm expecting like a B after the final. Crossing my fingers she'll make the grading scale a bit more lenient during our quarter!

I had Prado for fall 2017 (when she first taught). I think I over-studided for this class because I got an A+, and I focused too much on this course.

If you want to do well in the class (even though she's "harder" now), you need to review all her slides, do HARDINGER'S exams which are wayyy harder, and go to office hours to ask for help from LA's. If you prepare with HIS exams, you will already know pretty much everything. If you are slow at in-class exams, I would work on your pacing then. Otherwise, it's an easy A.

Dr. Prado is great. I was so nervous to take organic chemistry, but she made it really accessible-- even though I had a poor chem background, I was able to keep up. Pre-reading for lectures did help me in 14C (not so much in 14D) just because I had little to no familiarity with a lot of the concepts, and the textbook helped me figure out the vocabulary so lectures weren't as hard to follow. Her tests aren't too bad either because she provides a ton of resources. Like everyone else said, she posts all of the old midterms and finals and the lecture slides, and the discussion sections are optional for extra credit. The pre-class quizzes helped me stay accountable for the information and it was difficult to fall behind (which I also appreciated). Sapling problems were good practice too. Ultimately, everything she assigns is really worth your time and contributes to your understanding of the material. I'm taking her again for 14D and she's still great, I recommend her for any class she teaches!

Prado supposedly added a lot of material compared to when Hardinger taught it, and I definitely felt that. I studied a ton for this class, and memorizing all the mechanisms felt impossible at times. The grading scale is also pretty harsh at 95 to an A (I got a raw 93.7% and she curved it 1.5%—her curve was pretty generous in the B-C range but really limited for the A range, so it was almost straight scale). I definitely saw a correlation between grades and how long people spent studying. Her lectures can be pretty unclear at times, so your best bet is to just do all the practice you have available. Don't bother with OH worksheets, but the practice midterms and finals are really helpful so definitely do them and when you mess up on them practice those areas. As far as I know Prado and Tobolowsky have the same tests or similar very tests and also decided on the grading scheme together so don't let that be your deciding factor in who to take.