This class is a 5 unit lab class where you will explore the techniques of analytical chemistry. It is important to remember that with a 5 unit lab class, there will be weekly reports due that take up a majority of your time. The lab reports are no t as cutthroat as the physics 4AL/4BL series, but they do require you to put effort and create a complete analytical report. While his lectures are not in sync with the rotating lab periods, he does give you a good overview of the techniques used in analytical chemistry. Also, the techniques practiced during the lab sections are very fundamental and important to adding to your arsenal. The test were a bit tricky, but nothing new of information provided on the slides. Study the slides, read the book and do well on the lab/lab reports and this class should be no problem. I definitely learned a lot under prof loo and I hope he continues this class!

Dr. Loo is great. He has very interesting lectures with little bits of chemistry trivia. There is a lot of lab work, given that there are two days per week, but it's still a relatively light load for a five unit lab class. The lecture material isn't always correlated to lab but it often is. Brcause Dr. Loo is an MS specialist, the class focuses a lot on MS. The tests are somewhat challenging but they're not that bad as long as you study for them. I highly recommend taking this class.

The previous reviews are pretty accurate. I honestly enjoyed this class and I highly recommend it. The class structure was fair and reasonable. Dr. Loo himself is actually pretty funny and he always tried to make his lectures interesting with little anecdotes. He would gear lectures towards topics that actually interested him and were actually useful, so it never got too boring. You walk away from this class feeling like you actually learned something useful as a future chemist (even if it is mainly mass spec).

The midterm was really long and our class average was super low (55%). I bombed the midterm but I admit it wasn’t necessarily too difficult, he just expects you to remember a lot of little details from lecture, so you basically have to memorize the whole powerpoints.

Even with my low midterm I got an A in the class thanks to the lab reports. The reports make up the majority of your grade, and they will also take up the majority of your time. Lab reports are due every week and trust me, do not underestimate how long it will take you to finish them. I actually pulled my first all-nighters trying to get these done. They’re not super complicated but they do ask for a lot, and the TAs have pretty high standards for how they should be written. The labs are actually pretty interesting, and the lab work and data analysis itself was pretty quick. My TAs were absolutely incredible and I am very grateful that they made the lab experience so smooth.

I took this class Winter 2020, so week 10 and finals week were cut short by COVID. He ended up canceling our final group presentation, extended our final group report deadline, and gave us 24 hours to do a straightforward open-note final, which all showed me that Dr. Loo is a pretty understanding guy. Wish I got a chance to talk to him because he seemed really chill. I knew many people who avoided this class because of the grade distribution, but if you have even the slightest interest in learning instrumentation, I think you’ll be happy that you took this class.

This is a pretty well-ran upper division chemistry laboratory course. The entire class is basically a mass spectrometry class, as that is what Dr. Loo specializes in. Most of the TA's were pretty chill and helpful, and I enjoyed the lectures. Dr. Loo is definitely a chill and really funny guy but wasn't really involved in the class beyond lecturing twice a week. I saw him in lab only once giving a tour to some people, as the lab you are working in is a UCLA core facility. All the labs were based around analyzing sample(s) using a different type of mass spectrometer, so the labs usually always work well and any errors you elaborate on in your reports can be pinpointed to either random instrumental error, sample dilution errors, or poor instrumental settings. Plus, some of the labs are pretty cool, my personal favorite being DART-MS analysis of trace illicit drugs on U.S. currency. The labs really do show you how important analytical chemistry is in ensuring product safety, assessing chemical content in drugs, forensic analysis, etc.

The class content and the theory/analysis of the lab reports are definitely easier compared to some of the other upper division labs (I'm looking at you, Chem 185 and Chem 144), but compared to these other classes it is heavily backloaded. There was no lab for the first half of the class, so the only thing really to do was go to lecture twice a week. Lecture wasn't even mandatory, and it didn't really hurt you if you didn't go since he posts his slides on the class website and there was no assigned homework. He literally asked us if we wanted the midterm and final to be take home or in-person, and of course everyone voted for take-home. However, week 5-finals week were really intense. You will use pretty much all of the lab time (except for ICP-MS and DART-MS labs), and there will be reports due one week after the first lab period each week. Everyone will do all of the labs, but there is a rotating schedule. If your TA's were nice like ours, they will extend the deadline of each report to Sunday so you have the weekend to work on it. Like any lab report in an upper division chemistry laboratory class, they will take you a long time to write. Every Thursday-Sunday I was just grinding out these reports, and I made them really thorough since the TA's had among the highest expectations of any lab class I have taken at UCLA. Expect to write individual 11-12 paged reports single-spaced (ICP-MS will be longer though since there are a bunch of calibration curves to include). My biggest advice for getting a good grade on your reports is to expand on the scope of the project, i.e. instead of explaining just why GC-MS is an important analytical instrument, explain why GC-MS is important for assessing the nicotine content in various e-cigarette fluids (which is what we did in the lab). Also, one of the weeks is a break week, so just pray your group gets lucky with a week 10 break so you don't have to be grinding to complete the last report during finals week. On top of this, the take-home midterm and final did take me a full day each to do. They weren't hard necessarily, but Loo asks very specific things that you have to find in the textbook and sometimes the lecture slides. They kinda felt like scavenger hunt tests, but I'm not really complaining about not having to study. But all in all, I would definitely suggest this class for any chemistry major, especially if you are interested in pursuing a career in the analytical sciences.

This class is quite hard but one of the most useful classes I've taken at UCLA! Dr. Loo is amazing and incredibly caring. Midterm and final are hard and lab reports take forever but is incredibly rewarding!

CHEM 184: Do not take this professor unless you have the whole sets of old paper. He is too demanding. If you are taking one or two classes, it might be okay. But with three or four classes, you will fall behind within the first week and will never catch up with the material again. Exams are super-hard (You don't even know whether the problems are from 184 material.) and insanely long, making slow-paced people hard to pass. He will find anything to mark you down. His grading schemes are questionable too. I know some people got B's even though they did not finished their lab. He's one of those obnoxious people who takes the attitude that "life's going to treat you like shit so I'm going to treat you like shit - that way you'll be conditioned". This class was the most time-consuming class that I had at UCLA and ruined my transcript. Plus I came out learning nothing.

Awesome professor and awesome course. I'm a chem and matsci major and I had to take either 184 or 114 as an elective. After reading the horrendous reviews on Bouchard's 114, I signed up for 184 as soon as it was available. Took it remotely during covid, and the class was awesome. Lectures were engaging, and had fair workloads in terms of lab reports and exams. As long as you put some time into writing quality reports and taking notes, should be an easy A.