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+.

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.

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.