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-).

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.

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.

Lavelle is a pretty cool guy (he always reminded us to exercise our mind and body at the end of each lecture lol) and a pretty good professor as well. What I really liked about Lavelle were his UA sessions and Chem Community. All of his UAs are wonderful and they host numerous sessions every week for practice worksheets. A good tip I have is to go on Chem Community (even if you aren't in Lavelle's class) and find the UA Worksheets with the answers since they're the only practice problems you'll get for the midterms and finals. Chem Community is also a HUGE lifesaver for anyone taking Chem. Just search up the textbook question or Achieve question you're stuck on, and more than likely someone has a post about the detailed solution.

The only homework is Achieve, which is due every 2-3 weeks and takes a couple hours to complete. You should also do at least some of the textbook questions just to get a better grip on the content. As for the tests, I took them all online and they were all multiple-choice on Lockdown Browser. Beware though, these tests are an easy to way to get points off since each question is either worth 4 or 8 points. However, his questions are straightforward and don't require a lot of time to solve (they're just basic calculations). You'll be in great hands if you take Lavelle!

Dr. Lavelle is a generous professor who gave us many relevant materials and organzie lots of LA's tutoring session.
To get an A in this class, you need to complete the post-class materials he assigned on time. And attend the LA tutoring session. Because he will explain the concepts very clearly, there is not much time to practice in class.

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