Lavelle has been teaching this course at UCLA for what seems like decades, and because of that he has every resource in place for students to take advantage of to prepare for exams. In other words, people have no excuse to complain about their performance because there's always some resource you never took advantage of that resulted in a poor score.

I was in the first ever iteration of the hybrid version of this class, and I can attest that it was no different from being in the class normally (especially if you're prone to skipping lecture anyway). Those in this version have access to lecture recordings and different recordings that Lavelle posts himself. Watching either of these will get you the same amount of knowledge you need for the exams. In regards to Lavelle himself, he seems like a sweet old guy who smiles a lot, dances to music at the beginning of class, and cares about student learning. He goes through topics extremely slowly and clearly to make sure that people know what they're doing but focuses on the wrong topics during lecture in my opinion. A lot of his lectures were essentially derivations of equations, which are sections that I would normally skip in a textbook if I came across them, and very little is focused on problem solving. You can also totally get away with not going to the weekly workshops. All the problems he covers are the same as what you've already seen during lecture recordings.

Tests in this class were another type of beast I have never encountered in my educational career. There are two midterms that are 15 questions each, all multiple choice. Unfortunately this means that if you miss a single one, you've already got a 93-94 percent on the exam, so there's no room for error if you want an A in this class. There are also usually a couple of trick questions in there as well. Tests were more conceptual and therefore more confusing than a math based exam, which would leave you feeling like you did well right after just to find out that you did horribly when scores came out. I also don't understand why it takes a week to see scores for a multiple choice exam taken on Canvas. The final is 25 questions long, exact same format and just as challenging. There's no true way to prepare for the questions you're going to see besides doing all 1000 problems Lavelle assigns (optionally) on his syllabus and praying your critical thinking skills are sharp enough to figure out whatever problems are thrown at you. I feel very lucky to have escaped this class with an A the way that I did (went to one UA session all quarter and skimmed the practice problems the night before the exams bc I was very short on time), there were many others who did so much more work than I did who did not fare as well. Much luck to anyone who needs to take this class and has a busy schedule.

Overall I feel like my experience in this class would have been way better if not for Lavelle's tests. When I first started in the class, I enjoyed Lavelle's teaching style, thought the homework was manageable, and enjoyed the content. However, my biggest issues began with the midterms. Lavelle recently switched so that all his exams were multiple choice. Now, I already am not a fan of multiple choice exams when it comes to chemistry. I personally prefer free response so that it allows for the opportunity for partial credit. What made Lavelle's multiple choice the worst was that they were not only largely conceptual and worded very confusingly, there were also very few questions. Midterm 1 and 2 both only had 15 questions but were each worth 60 points, while the final had 25 questions and was worth 100 points. This means each question was worth 4 points and missing even a few could add a detrimental hit to your grade. To succeed in this class takes a combination of a lot of hard work and luck. Lavelle will test on material he does not cover in lecture, so, to be honest, it is extremely helpful to read the textbook and do all the optional textbook questions he assigns. Also, Lavelle does not have office hours so I found the most helpful resource to be the UA hours. While the UAs did have sessions throughout the week to also review content, I would say only spend your time going to sessions when they are midterm or final prep based. In general I did not think all the UAs were the best at explaining the material, however since they all had Lavelle in the past they did provide good practice for the exams. The one saving grace for my grade was that Lavelle did provide an extra credit opportunity at the end of the quarter, which I am super grateful for. However keep in mind, that without the extra credit opportunity accounted for, I believe you can only miss 4 multiple choice questions across the board in order to get an A in this class. Also, when Lavelle lectured I often found he went on side tangents and discussed derivations that to me seemed useless, but he did sometimes test on these so make sure you pay attention.

Lavelle is a fine lecturer, and I partially enjoyed watching his presentations. He explained the concepts well and gave a good amount of in-class examples. I think one thing I disliked about the class is the fact that because the tests are multiple choice, your grade can be swayed massively by a single question, and a good portion of the material on the tests were not covered in class or were fringe edge-cases of topics not relevant to overall material. However, the tests overall were not challenging, but missing a few questions on each test will bring you down a full letter grade. He also never released his grading distributions, all he said was that a 50% and above would be a passing grade (C-).

Pros
- Lots of resources — TA office hours (shoutout to Arthur!), UA Workshops, optional practice problems, optional discussion sections. I do recommend going to at least a majority of these, especially the office hours or workshops, and be sure to ask questions on ANYTHING you're not sure about. If you're also low on time, focus on the Focus Questions that he assigns instead of the individual sections, because they're slightly more reflective of his exams.
- Final grades are curved — not exactly sure what's the specific grade breakdown, but a 50% is passing with a C- and 82% is a B+
- Derivation-based lectures — This could be a pro or a con to be honest. Personally, his explanations made more intuitive sense to me and helped me on the exams, and even when I didn't understand exactly what he was talking about, asking a TA or UA makes everything a loooot clearer
- Bruincasted lectures — not required to go to to lecture :)

Cons
- Exams — His first midterm kinda came at a surprise because it wasn't like this at least four years ago. They are MCQ, mostly conceptual-based exams, and each question is weighted pretty heavily (ie: Missing one question docks you 4 points out of your total grade of 300 points). Also, you can only see your exams from a TA and you can never see them again.
- Chemistry Community — Sure, I guess in theory it's nice to have students actively answer other students' questions about chemistry, but it just felt like a giant groupme that you're forced to talk and ask questions in
- Not receptive to emails — People made a fuss about Midterm #2 because it was thermochem, which is admittedly difficult conceptually, and there was a question where Lavelle (or his TAs; it was never really clear) had to go back and manually change each individual's exam grade. I guess he got annoyed and TAs were warning everybody not to email him because he would deduct points off your grade for whatever reason. I have no idea if this was true, but I would err on the side of caution.

Overall, I liked Lavelle's class, but I definitely know a lot of people who didn't. It's a hard class, so just be open to reaching out for help whenever you need it.

The lectures were pretty hard for me to understand and a lot of the material covered in lecture was not reflected in the exams. The exams (midterms, final) were very conceptual and not like the practice textbook problems. The tests also had 15 questions for the midterm and 25 for the final, so just a few questions wrong puts you at a C.

TL;DR: Lavelle is a gem of a professor. The class is difficult though because there is no partial credit offered on the tests and not much margin for error given the extremely high weightage of the midterms/final on the overall class grade.

Dr. Lavelle is a funny, thoughtful, and caring professor. He is extremely knowledgable and teaches extremely well in lecture; he is clear and conducts class at the perfect pace.

With that being said, the majority of the difficulty of this class comes from the midterms and final. There is not much required work associated with this class, but a lot of self-study in order to succeed. The midterms and final were all multiple choice, meaning there was no partial credit offered. Therefore, missing just a few questions per exam could immediately hurt your grade. About half of the questions on the exams were conceptual, mainly coming from ideas discussed in the lecture. The other half were calculation-based problems, for which the textbook problems are somewhat helpful. For each week, there are a whole lot of assigned (but optional) textbook problems. Most of these are calculation-based problems, and Lavelle includes one or two problems verbatim from the assigned textbook list in each exam to incentivize students to do them.

There were A LOT of resources offered by Lavelle for all students to succeed in this class: weekly TA/UA office hours/sessions and Chemistry Community, an online Reddit-like forum for chemistry-related questions.

The grading scale was as follows:
Midterm 1: 60 points (15 MCQ, 4 pts each)
Midterm 2: 60 points (15 MCQ, 4 pts each)
Final: 100 points (25 MCQ, 4 pts each)
Chemistry Community: 30 points (Free completion points)
Achieve Homework: 50 points (Free completion points)

To get an A in this class, you can only miss 5 questions (20 points) the whole quarter across the two midterms and final, since the multiple choice questions are all or nothing (no partial credit offered). This makes the exams difficult just because there is not much margin for error in order to get an excellent grade. However, Lavelle did offer 4 points of extra credit this quarter, so technically you could miss 6 and still get an A.
Midterm 1 was very easy - covered just 2 weeks of content. Midterm 2 was WAY more difficult, covering all of thermochemistry and thermodynamics. The final was roughly the same difficulty as the second midterm (and covered the whole course), so the class definitely gets harder as you go.

Overall, my only issue with this class was the exam structure being not so forgiving. There were WAY too many textbook problems (50+ each midterm) that were assigned to us, with only 1 or 2 of them being of value for each exam. It is extremely important to pay attention in lecture as half the exam questions are entirely conceptual, stemming from the concepts discussed in class.
Lavelle is a great professor and offers all the resources necessary to succeed in what is supposed to be a challenging chemistry class. He is a wonderful guy, but be ready to work hard to succeed in this class.

I really did not enjoy my experience in this class. I did get an A but was only able to because I attended hours and hours of sessions outside of class in addition to a stupid amount of time practicing on my own. He does provide a lot of review sessions outside of class but I actually don’t think it’s possible to do well in the class without going to like two a week. I’m not one who’s ever needed to attend a session before and at first I didn’t believe these reviews that you really need to go, but the first test was a bit of a wake up call. This pretty much demonstrates how useless lecture is, all he does is derive stuff that will never be tested and isn’t important to your understanding of the material. However you still need to go because every now and then he’ll say one obscure conceptual thing and it’ll be on the test, and since the tests are so few questions (15) it takes away a big chunk of the grade to miss even one. The professor is not a bad guy, I would say I do agree with the other reviews on here that he’s a bit stuck up, loves to call himself generous, but he isn’t a mean person. But the tests are stressful and ridiculous, and the class requires way more time and energy than is really reasonable. I honestly ignored my other classes so bad I’m really lucky they weren’t that hard and I was able to squeak by. If you have to take it with him yeah you can do it. It’ll be a lot of work and make sure your other classes are easy.

I don’t know where to start. I felt really hopeful about this class in the beginning because I really enjoyed the lectures and found the way he taught helpful in understanding the information. He also includes a significant amount of resources for practice: TA worksheets, an online chemistry forum, textbook problems and solutions, and online homework. This class was set up to be everything I could ever ask for in a chemistry course. I had so many resources at my disposal to use for practice which is usually what rigorous courses can lack. That being said, this class was a disaster. I used every resource, yet the exams reflected none of the information I had been given to practice. Multiple choice exams also left no room for partial credit. Exams were 100% conceptual. I couldn’t solve one practice problem without my calculator but on the exam I’d use my calculator maybe once and sometimes not at all. The TA practice worksheets were also unrelated to exam content as he never shared the exam with even them. It didn’t matter how hard I studied or how many resources I used, the exam would have 4-5 problems about concepts that I’d never heard of and certainly never heard of in lecture. Since the exams only had 15 questions, if you miss any more than 3 questions you’re already at a C. The class looks so incredible on the surface, but because of the exams alone I think I can safely say I’ve never taken a worse science course. This same quarter I took Chem 30B and finished with a B+ so that should tell you I’m by no means a bad student, this class just isn’t practical. I will probably have to retake it. Hoping my review can steer everyone far far away. If you take this class you WILL deeply regret it.

This class is a flipped classroom even though it's not marketed as one. No matter how many lectures you attend, the textbook problems that are assigned not for a grade are the most useful thing that will prepare you for the exams which are hit or miss (more often miss). If you have a light quarter load, this class may be fine, but if you are balancing other harder stem courses or have more extra curriculars to manage, this is not the easiest class to maintain your work ethic in since there are many problems to complete and not enough time to fully learn everything. His lectures are not engaging and often do not explain enough or they over explain topics that are barely tested on.

I thought Lavelle was a wonderful professor and I genuinely enjoyed the class. He teaches at a really slow pace, but he makes each topic really simple and easy to understand. The tests weren't hard; it was all really fair. He's also so passionate about his peer learning groups and his blog but its actually really helpful. Overall, an easy class, a great professor, and loved the vest and hat combo.