Professor Harran is a great guy. He tries to make his lectures fun and attempts to connect with real world topics. He is a master at what he teaches, and often surrounds himself with friends that have great accolades in the field as well. BUT, at the end of the day it is OCHEM after all. This class is not easy, it is very demanding, professor is not demanding, the class is. Since there's no HW or any BS points, its just 2 tests and a final. So basically u have to get your sh*t together if u want to succeed. Class is curved, but that doesn't mean you can stop putting the effort in. The class averages were definitely scary every time.

WARNING: don't try to memorize anything, he purposely makes tests that require you to have a decent understanding. So instead of memorizing reactions, learn how and why each of the steps work. (etc. electron pushing, resonance, stuff that you have to practice NOT memorize!)

Averages:
- MT 1 - ~60
- MT 2 - 51

- Final - we were not given an average or our scores back but take a look above and you can guess how we did.

Class avg was probably curved to a C or C+.

I loved this class so much. The professor was very knowledgable of the subject and expanded the content we learned to other interesting things. Harran made jokes here and there and you could tell he really loved the subject. His lectures were pretty good because he does a demonstration mostly on the whiteboard to explain concepts while the slides were there to lay out organized and detailed tables that are helpful to review. The class was engaging and the TAs were wonderful and they busted their butts off to help all of the students. I really liked how direct the grading and exams were. The scores came out pretty fast as well. Despite the gnarly averages, the curves helped a lot. I ended up getting a 90 and then a 70 on the midterms and ended up getting an A. As long as you score over the average by a margin of 15-25 I don't think you do not have to worry about getting below an A. There were many resources and helpful resources, the best being the professors and TAs themselves. The textbook is genuinely the best thing to study if you want to understand the content well. It takes a lot of time and effort to really understand the material. This class is a reflection of how if you really want it, you can have it, but you need to work hard for it.

Some advice would be to not fall behind. Always stay on top of the class and read ahead of time. Ask your TA or professor for help. Practicing problems and doing the textbook problems were very helpful, too. It's all about repetition and understanding how things worked.

While I was a bit terrified going into this course (I last took Gen Chem over a year ago), Dr. Harran is an incredible lecturer and made me interested in organic chemistry. He often brought up connections of what we were learning to real world topics (such as drug development), and managed to make this really hard topic pretty interesting. I would recommend taking this class with Dr. Harran! He makes the lectures fun, is approachable, and includes a lot of real-life examples to make what we're learning interesting!
Chem 30A will always be a difficult course; there's no real way around that. The lectures are bruincasted, and a lot of question types on the exams are directly related to examples shown in lecture. I felt that the exams were difficult, but the questions asked were usually pretty reasonable.
The grading was out of 450 points. There were two midterms worth 100 points each (averages were about 61% and 51%, respectively), a final worth 200 points, and 50 points from the discussion section quizzes (which I'm not sure if were graded based on participation or correctness). I scored in the ballpark of 20% above the average on both midterms and ended up with an A in the class, and I think the class is curved to make a B- the average grade.
My advice I guess is to enter this class with an open mind (the material is difficult, but doable), do a lot of practice problems, watch YouTube videos explaining the concepts, and practice it a lot! One of the TAs (shoutout Morris and Alek!) told us during a midterm review session that a lot of organic chemistry is applying simple-ish concepts to difficult applications, and I think that that is kinda the way to approach it. Learn the concepts and then practice doing some of the more difficult applications/problems, and you will do well!

Harran is one of the most passionate professors I've ever seen at UCLA, which I really appreciate. He always connected organic chemistry topics to real-life scenarios and gave background stories of other scientists and practical methods using compounds we studied. However, his lectures were very difficult to follow-- most of my friends and I had no idea what he was talking about until studying the concepts on our own. With that said, the TAs for this class were absolutely amazing and taught better than any professor I've ever had (slay Morris and Alek). If you have a good TA, watch lots of youtube videos on content (I recommend the channels "crash course organic chemistry" and "organic chemistry tutor"), and complete tons of practice problems, you should be fine. I literally scored a 40% on both midterms and still got a solid B in the class, despite exams being 100% of our grade. Yes, you heard that right... no homework, labs, or small assignments, just exams. This is a bit brutal and took me the whole quarter to get used to, but as long as you're close to the average or score a bit higher on the final, you will be fine. Seriously PRACTICE the content every day though, or else you're screwed. FYI the class averages this quarter were 62% on midterm 1 and 51% on midterm 2, but the grade for finals were never released, we just got our curved final grade. Based on MYUCLA and groupme polls I believe the entire class average for final grades was around a B- to a B.

Dr. Harran is a pretty good professor. He explains the material well, has a decent sense of humor, and tries to make Organic Chemistry as painless/enjoyable as possible, which he did a fairly good job in doing.

Although his lectures are usually not overwhelming, his first midterm was very time constrained. However, his exams in general are fair. In order to get an A, make sure you are in the top 30 of the students and you should be fine. He also cranks out grades quickly, which is good. I recommend him.

Midterm 1- Average:60
Midterm 2-59
Final-70

Taking Harran's class was like a train wreck where you would think this couldn't get worse, but it just did. First off, the class structure and grading is terrible. There were quizzes that even until finals week, we didn't know if they were based off of participation or completion as the TAs emphasized they were "study materials", but no one ever got the same answer when we asked if they were completion based or grade based. Second, the exams were notoriously difficult and we were not prepared for any of the material in lecture. The TAs tried to fix what the professor ruined(aka he wasted lots of time talking about biochemistry and applications rather than just sticking to the content and examples). His excuse for his behavior was that students should be learning at home and that's true, but he wouldn't even give us a basis for which we can actually learn or expand our knowledge. It would be okay if the biochem tested was on the test but literally none of it was so it was just useless going to lecture. The TAs were great they tried their best to help the rest of the class as much as they could by holding review sessions, office hours, and being as open as they could be with emails and whatnot(shoutout Morris and alek). However, if it weren't for the TAs I would have had an even worse experience. Finally, going over the Professor, he is just terrible. One of the things a lot of people won't tell you or something that you will figure out is that he was involved in a lab accident dating back to 2009, where his lab was not meeting the proper requirements to operate resulting in the death of one of his lab members. He had 4 felonies to his name which were all dropped because UCLA defended him with 4.5 million dollars that would have been awarded to the family. If you search his name into google, or even read this article https://cen.acs.org/safety/lab-safety/Charges-dropped-against-UCLA-chemistry/96/web/2018/09 you will be able to understand more about the situation. It is honestly disgusting how we are still employing this man, he is a horrible lecturer and an even worse person. I would never go as far as to taint a professor's name, but since he indeed did get away with teaching this class and the lab accident with nothing but a "slap on the wrist" since he is tenured, I simply do not care. If you happen to take this class, have an amazing quarter living in anguish.

Really good professor overall! His examples are super helpful and well explained. Ochem is challenging so don't expect otherwise but if you attend lecture and read the book, everything is pretty straight forward. He has his TAs take roll in discussion so be prepared to go every week.

I took Professor Harran in Fall 2010, for Chem 30A.

Overall, fantastic professor. He has powerpoints, which are honestly useless, but his notes, examples, and presentation are excellent. He expects quite a bit, as his exams are analogous with those of Dr. Craig Merlic. So if you want good practice, simply study Merlic's exams, and you will be a-okay. Office hours are great, though at times he may get a bit impatient. However his office is posh, so that may be a motivator - overall, a great professor, with a passion for organic chemistry.

Exam Averages: 1 and 2 around 60, final around 55.

Took chem105 with this guy. In his lectures, his words follow a logical progression which makes it easy to understand and comprehend (much more clear than those professors that jump around on topics). I’m sure he’s an excellent professor for the ochem series.

Selling the Textbook and Solutions Manual for cheap. I got it brand new like three months ago and its the newest edition.