Hard to avoid him as a 14BL teacher, which sucks. He's horrible in every way. Just cross your fingers and suck it up for 10 weeks, that's really the only thing you can do.

I haven't gotten my final grade yet, but - Pang is ridiculous, and there's no easy way to not take a lab course with him.

The exams were heavily conceptual, and the study guides for them are all calculations. Furthermore, the concepts that are covered in lecture are not detailed enough in the lecture notes. You have to listen to him incredibly carefully in order to get all the details about eutectic substances, how to calculate pH (his way, of course), etc. Thankfully, his accent isn't as bad as some other professors'.

Now, while it's only 8% of your grade, CPR is incredibly frustrating because it is literally pitting pre-med against pre-med. If you had the potential to screw with someone's grade, even if it's only by a few points, wouldn't you? Probably. On both CPR's, I would have someone grade me really high and someone grade me really low, and I ended up getting B's on both CPR's. Those should be easy A's since they're incredibly straight forward.

But of course, if CPR doesn't bother the hell out of you, wait for the lab reports - Pang's instructions on these are incredibly, incredibly vague. My lab partner and I would attempt to do the reports by ourselves but we got a really low score on the first and then just decided to copy away. Get someone else's old labs. Every point matters in this class, and yes, it's absolutely unfortunate that old labs are pretty much required for this course. Seriously, Pang, if you read this, don't you think that something's wrong if your students can really only pass this course if they have old labs?

The man is just a genuinely mean, arrogant person. He's always been nice to me, but I see him treat other people in just disgusting ways. He is very dismissive of undergrads, and his ego is huuuuuuge. He rarely yells at people; think belittling, passive-aggressive, open condescension. All this goes down in office hours or interactions outside of the lecture hall, during lecture he's basically a dry, stick-to-the-material kind of lecturer. That being said, it's pretty easy to just stay on his good side or avoid him completely by not asking for anything and not expecting attention. He's probably the least available professor I've ever met.

Pang will give you a study guide to prepare you for the exam, then give you an exam that does not relate to the study guide. There is practically no calculations on the test, yet most of the study guide consists of calculations. The curve will destroy you since there is no curve, and regardless if you beat the rest of the class on the midterm, it will not change the fact that you did not get 100%. Your T.A. is extremely important in this class. They can hurt you more than most other T.A's because they grade all your labs and have the power to grade as they please.

This guy sucks. He does not know how to lecture. He is not a good teacher. I am embarrassed to be a UCLA student and call him a professor. He is always being reported to the dean of students and doesn't realize that he is truly an asshole and no one likes him.

Not as hard as everyone says he is. A very good lecturer. Your grades labs are very dependent on who your T.A. is. The tests were fair this quarter but I've seen previous quarters and they were HARD. Overall a caring teacher.

Chem 14BL was not a difficult class at all, but it definitely is time-consuming. To sum some important points up:
1) There are two lab reports due each week: A pre-lab for the experiment you are going to conduct in the lab and a post-lab for the experiment you did last week. The pre-labs are pretty easy. Just remember that you check your sig figs in your calculations and make sure you don't round your numbers until the very end of the calculation. Usually you get points docked off if your sig figs or answers are off by a little. The post labs usually take a bit more time, with the analysis of the data and applying the concepts that Pang teaches you in lecture. The most time-consuming post labs were the Beer's Law one and the Chemical Kinetics one (which were both group labs, by the way). Otherwise, lab reports are really easy points if you put in the effort. Also, don't be scared if your experiment gave the wrong results: As long as you explain your errors well, you will be fine. The lab reports are supposedly graded according to the same rubric that Pang designs, so everyone is graded on the same scale.
2) The class is NOT curved. If you get 90-100%, that's an A; 80-89%, that's a B, etc. Therefore, you don't need to worry about competition and everyone else is more willing to help each other.
3) Pang's lectures are actually very well organized and he basically prints out the lecture guide for you, which resembles his powerpoint presentations. Sometimes, he would do some example problems or throw out extra concepts that are not on his powerpoint, but you should write those down because they might show up on the exams. I thought Pang made the concepts really easy to understand, and he was also a very approachable professor. He is always willing to help: Just e-mail him or go to his office hours.
4) There are online writing assignments called CPR's (or Calibrated Peer Reviews). You basically have to write a short essay responding to the prompt they give you, and afterwards, you have to grade three of your classmates' essays (chosen randomly by the server) and then give your own essay a grade, from a scale of 1-10. I was unlucky because the grades my graders gave me happened to deviate a lot from each other. For example, on the first assignment, I got an 8, 6, and 4, while I gave myself a 7. Therefore, I lost a huge chunk of points because my self-assessment deviated too much from the average, which was a 4.89 (pulled down by the score of 4). However, the CPR's themselves are pretty simple and are only worth 8% of your final grade, so even if you don't do well on them, you don't need to worry. They're only 20 points each.
5) There are two cumulative exams. I guess you can consider the first one as a sort of "midterm" because you take it sometime during 4th or 5th week. It basically covers concepts from calibrations, sig figs, basic stoichiometric calculations, Beer's Law, and titrations & buffers. The second exam, which is the "final", consists of all the concepts stated previously, in addition to recrystallization, melting point theory, and chemical kinetics. You should basically do the study guide that Pang gives you, but do not think that memorizing the study guide will do the trick, because the exam is formatted differently from the study guide. The exam is based on conceptual understandings of the material, even though some are just basically calculations of concentrations or errors. For some questions, Pang gives you graphs (depending on the concept) and asks you to analyze the data. But it is not difficult at all as long as you have a relative understanding of the concepts. I did not think the final exam was difficult at all. At the end, though, there is a section "Reality Check," where Pang gives you a situation and you have to name the concept we learned in class that deals with that situation. So like I said before, you should have a relative understanding of the concepts.
6) The labs are the best part of this class! Maybe because I love doing experiments, so I might be a bit biased, but I really really enjoyed the experimental aspects of this class. It really helped me put the concepts to action and I felt like I learned a lot of valuable things from this course. However, I wish there would be more exciting experiments. Like for the first lab, all we did was calibrate volumetric pipets, which was not too exciting. But oh well, I'm sure Chem 14CL will be awesome.

Basically, Pang is the professor that teaches most of the Chem 14BL and Chem 14CL lectures, so you can't really avoid him. However, he is very nice and very smart, and if you put in a sufficient amount of effort in the lab write-ups and experiments, which helps you understand the concepts well, you will be fine.

14BL is an extremely easy class.

Labs are a piece of care because Pang tells you exactly what you need on each part to get full points. The only difficult part on the labs is the Assignment part. The problems itself aren't hard, but if you don't have proper sig figs (the rules seem to differ every time) or show proper work, you'll lose points. But you'll be fine if you just check it with someone else.

CPRs are very easy too. Just answer every question explicitly in your text and you'll for sure get at least an 8/10. Grading other peoples' papers are so easy too...I don't know why everyone is complaining. You just check to see if they answered the questions or not and just deduct points based on how many they failed to answer. That's all.

Now, for tests. I don't know where the hell these kids got the idea that Pang's tests are totally "conceptual." It's true that he says from day one that his tests will be conceptual, but they really aren't. You guys are mistaking word problems for being "conceptual" problems. On the midterm that I just took, there was only one conceptual question involving Beer's Law and selecting which graph would be appropriate. The other ones were just word problems with lengthy explanations that end up boiling down to "find the molarity, ppm, w/v%, etc." Another one was "is this a buffer?" and "what makes a good buffer?" Not conceptual at all.

I can sorta see where frustration would arise, though. The lab manual tends to be confusing at first. Also, Pang kinda throws concepts at you and expects you to know/remember them, like titrations.

Overall great class. My easiest this quarter.

There is absolutely no reason this class should be as difficult or as time-consuming as it is, especially considering that it is only 3 units!!! The labs are the biggest chunk of your grade so rack up all the points you can on these. Though this is time consuming, it is worth your time to do well on. The CPRs (online writing assignments) are also kind of random because it's basically dependent on how good you are at grading other people's CPRs and how good you are at rating your own. Don't worry about these at all because you can only try your best and wish for the best. As for the midterm and final - RIDICULOUS is all I can say. I've done well in every single chem lecture of the 14 series, did the study guide, went to every single 8 am lecture, and even read the books, and I still did horribly on both of Pang's tests. I think the reason for this is that there is nowhere to get help in this class in order to succeed on the exams. Pang is very unhelpful (though very nice and much more pleasant mannered than you'd expect from what you see in lecture) in office hours, the TAs have no idea what's going on in terms of helping you with the midterm/final, and there is basically nowhere you can turn to in order to find out what concepts he wants you to know. Pang is not necessarily a bad lecturer - he goes at the SPEED OF LIGHT but he speaks fairly clearly and the accent is not bothersome at all. However, what he lectures on barely shows up on the exams, and if it does, it's twisted and/or hidden somehow. I've heard Russell isn't that much better, so you don't really have too much of a choice, but just be prepared and don't feel bad if you don't do well - it probably isn't your fault, especially if you put in all the time/studying/effort that you could. The chem labs at UCLA just need to be restructured to be as fair as the lecture classes.

The reviews on this page on Pang are too exaggerated.. I think Pang was a GREAT professor. Though you have to study a LOT and take GOOD lecture notes, his class is fair and not too difficult (though you have to put in quite some time for the labs). He is VERY concerned about student learning and is VERY helpful in office hours. Most of the people posting negative comments on this probably never went to his office hours. Dr. Pang does have an accent and goes tremendously fast during lecture, he needs to go fast in order to cover all the material you need to know. HE HAS NO OTHER CHOICE!! if you take good lecure notes and study hard for the exams, you will do well in the class. I got a 50% in one of the CPRs, but i still got a good grade in his class.