Professor Courey is so AMAZING!! He's extremely helpful and approachable. He dedicates a lot of time to this course and cares so much about his students. I took the 3-week intensive version of this course over the summer, and the pace of it was pretty fast, but Professor Courey still taught everything very thoroughly. Going to office hours was really helpful because he goes through problems and concepts in detail. For the 3 weeks, he had office hours for 2 hours twice a week on top of lecturing every day for 2.5 hours. Additionally, on the first week of class, my LA couldn't make it to class, so Dr. Courey acted as my LA for discussion. For those 2 days, he taught us literally from 9 AM to 4:30 PM (lecture, discussion, office hours).

We only had two exams, and I thought they were both fair. The first one was challenging, but Professor Courey offered a chance to get a lot of our points back through test corrections. Also, when a lot of people were concerned about grades, he listened and stayed up until 2 AM the morning before our second exam in order to edit the test and make it easier for us.

Going to discussion is VERY important, and the tests are closely modeled after the pre-class quizzes he gives and the problems on the discussion worksheets. Because of COVID and the online format, the tests are open-note, so the questions are a bit more challenging than the exams from previous years. However, if you make sure to understand all the questions on the discussion worksheets and pay attention to the polling questions during lecture, the tests are definitely more than manageable. I'm so glad I took this class with Professor Courey!

This class is do-able you just gotta put in tons of effort and time. I never paid attention to live lectures because he would be covering new topics when there was a quiz coming up covering previous topics. I only participated for the learning catalytics, which are based on participation and not accuracy. I only started learning the material a few days before a quiz/test. He has TONS of materials and practice for you. I made sure to utilize everything he gave us.

1. Read over textbook for a general understanding, take notes
2. Watch lecture recordings and annotate on his slides
3. Make notes for each learning objective
4. Re-do his POGIL worksheets on your own
5. GO TO OFFICE HOURS
6. Do LA worksheets
7. Review PTL and Learning Catalytics
8. Do practice exams if there are any

Make sure you understand literally everything he says, all the questions asked in worksheets. Office hours are so so so important for that. I'm so thankful that his curve at the end bumped my final and overall grade up. He's very approachable as well, and Piazza helps so much. Generally, I don't feel comfortable asking questions but piazza came in clutch for me.

I loved Dr. Courey!!!! He was great at lecturing and you can really tell he cared so much about his students. His midterms were very doable if you studied the learning objectives and POGIL worksheets. I highly recommend taking this class with him. Most of these bad reviews are just because of the final. However, everything else went smoothly in his class and he curved the test so much and also curved the grading score to make a 91% an A. He is super considerate and listens to his students. TAKE THIS CLASS WITH HIM HE’S THE SWEETEST PERSON EVER!!!

Dr. Courey is an incredible professor. point blank. He is VERY accommodating and understanding to say the least. Personally, I loved the enhanced series. I thought the structure was very similar to high school in that you have assignments throughout the week and tests every couple of weeks, unlike other classes like Chem 14A, where essentially your test scores are what determine your grade.

Overall, if you are good at keeping track of your assignments, communicating and asking for help, and don't like the idea of a couple of test grades determining your overall grade, I definitely recommend this class.

General chemistry is not supposed to be easy by no means, and there is not an easy way out, so you have to expect that you are going to be doing assignments and putting in many hours outside of class studying the material. However, this professor is very clear and easy to understand and engage with.

This professor was very reasonable except for the final. The final was extremely long and almost nobody finished; however he did curve upwards after the final which was good. He also is very good at explaining things, and although the course material is extremely dense, his office hours are helpful in clarifying everything. Overall, I think I learned a decent amount.

Take most of these reviews with a grain of salt—in my opinion, to be successful in this course, besides learning the content, you really have to get used to the types of questions that are asked on exams vs. quizzes. For me, the quizzes (CMC's) and exam multiple choice questions were harder than the free response portions. This is because they are very conceptual and REALLY try to trick you. This sounds stupid but you kind of have to ask yourself "what concept is the professor trying to test me about?"/"how is this question trying to trick me?". I think a lot of people get confused by the terminology, so you just have to read carefully and check your work. Free response questions were super straightforward if you're allowed to reference your notes—they were mainly plug-and-chug type problems, you just have to recognize what equation to use. To study, I'd suggest focusing on the discussion worksheets especially, slides, learning catalytics, and maybe the PRWA's. I was too lazy to do the LA worksheets and I was fine. For the PRWA's, just make sure you hit all the rubric points and be nice when grading others. The final was a bit of a time crunch, but what helped me was creating an equations sheet with everything on it and the TA's giving partial credit. I took AP chem in high school, so I do know my experience might be different from others, but I don't think anyone should be discouraged from taking this class. I really would suggest this class if you have the time for it!

I honestly hated the content of Chem14BE/B compared to Chem14AE/A. For context, I took Chem14AE with Professor Deweese, which was her first quarter teaching, and I loved the content of the class and her style of teaching. I scored 99%+ on both midterms (however the final was another thing), but I ended with an A in that class. For Chem14BE, the first half of the quarter is taught by Professor Courey and the second is taught by Deweese. Professor Courey seems very sweet and understanding, but his slides and style of teaching just didn't stick that well with me. I did terrible on the midterm individual phase, but basically everyone did with a 56% average. I enjoyed Deweese's and understood her part of the quarter a lot more, which helped me clutch up on the final and end up with an A. I will say that it took a lot of repetition and redoing problems for me to fully comprehend the content, so make sure to practice and REVIEW content!! There's also a lot of grade buffer too with the amount of assignments but it is a bit of work, however I didn't mind it. If you don't really like multiple assignments or longer discussions, or just generally learn better on your own, I would take 14B.

Overall this class was so much work and the quizzes were crazy hard. But the midterms and final were VERY reasonable, especially if you studied. Definitely rely on your TAs for help

I'm grateful I never have to return to this class. I think it was a lot of work in comparison to other classes. This class had the most homework I've had in a college course so far. The only benefit of that is your grade does not rely on your midterm and final as much, which thank goodness because that final was an acid dream (no pun intended). I did not find the lectures helpful. The textbook half taught me things. This class is just very tiring.

What can I say, Courey is the GOAT!! Definitely take this class. If I could do it, you can too, trust. For context, I'm not even a biochem major. I barely got a C in 153A but needed 5 quarter units of biochem for professional school prereqs, so I was hesitant to enroll in this class. The material itself is complicated, but it's totally doable. I ended up finding this class super interesting too. It's different than 153A in the sense that you aren't memorizing a bunch of pathways, so if you're better at understanding structures, this class is for you. Courey makes sure you can visualize concepts by using 3D digital models which is rly helpful if you're a visual learner. His slide decks are super clean and very well organized. There's lots of extra credit opportunities and the exams are super fair and you'll do great as long as you keep up with the problem sets (which is not graded but many questions are representative of exam content + he goes over some of them in tutorial) and do the discussion worksheets (you can keep doing corrections until you get 100%).