There are so many things wrong with this class and the way Reilly is running it I don't even know where to start. First of all, the practice problems we are given are RIDICULOUSLY easy compared to the exam questions. There is absolutely no way to prepare for the exams without a tutor or something when the first time you're seeing questions of that level of difficulty is on the exams themselves. It's literally like there's some sort of intent to "surprise" us or something. We're genuinely being set up to fail. On top of that, nearly every answer key she posts is wrong. Even half of the corrections that are made to the answer keys have mistakes in them, which is just unacceptable. We receive practice midterms usually the day before the exam, sometimes even the day of, which is entirely unhelpful. She never does things when she says she is going to do them. Instructions for assignments are sent out late. Practice problems are sent out late. Answer keys are sent out late. The list goes on. She wastes time in class showing us pictures of her dog and then claims she can't go through material any slower because of how much content she has to cover. Overall, the class is a complete mess and Reilly is EXTREMELY disorganized. It'd be a little better if she was even remotely sympathetic but she isn't (regardless of the fact that we are still in a pandemic and students are already struggling as is). She doesn't seem to care about her students at all and puts no effort into helping us do well in the class. She takes no responsibility for her own mistakes and can't seem to grasp the fact that she is the problem, not the students (whose study strategies she blames for her low exam averages). The only thing this class has taught me is that the amount of effort you put into a class has zero correlation with the amount of success you have when the professor doesn't want you to succeed. The sad part is that I actually liked organic chemistry. The content itself makes sense to me. Reilly ruined it. Do not take 14D with Reilly unless you're wanting a horrible, horrible experience.

I learned more about her dogs than ochem.

We still have two more weeks left, but I already feel obliged to leave a review because of how stressed and traumatized I already am. Disclaimer: Reilly is knowledgeable and it shows in her lectures, but that's the ONLY pro I can think of. Everything else, a nightmare. She uploads practices only 1-2 days before the midterm, if not, literally the NIGHT BEFORE. Her answer keys had various mistakes in them, so she had to upload multiple "corrected" versions. Her explanations on how she calculates final grades are incredibly vague, so no one knows where they truly stand in the class. Is she dropping the lower midterm score, or replacing it with......? How is she going to curve/scale class? Everything is still very murky at this point. The worst part: her midterms are notoriously difficult and nowhere near her practice exams -- especially the second one. The average was in the high 50's, which is NOT okay. Maybe she made her exams harder because they were "online," but it was highly disproportional. Even if I do end up with an A-/A in this class, I will not go back to this professor in a heartbeat. The anxiety, uncertainty, and constant doubt of my ochem knowledge was just too much.

Edit: I ended up with an A- in this class. Based on my calculations, part of me thinks she never curved like she promised. But who knows, because we never even got back our final exam scores. While I'm satisfied with my grade, I can still say that last quarter was the most stressful ever. Not to mention she promised to make an extra credit eval google doc for those who missed them, but never did. She even replied to my email saying she would, but as expected, Reilly is too disorganized to remember

For some reason I won’t ever understand the chemistry department at UCLA decides to put all of its most new / disorganized / tenured professors into the 14 series. Before 14D with Professor Rilley I went through the trenches of Scerri for 14A/B and Lannan for 14C. Going into this quarter, I knew nothing would be able to phase me anymore lmao... This is one of the first times Rilley has taught 14D but during lecture you could see how throughly she knew the material. I have never seen this level of mastery from any other chem department prof I’ve had so far and I truly appreciate how truly she is passionate about the subject. Instead of slides she does annotated notes. I think this was helpful because having to draw so many molecules and reactions out from scratch would be too time consuming during lecture. But unfortunately, the syllabus assigned for this class is poorly designed and forced her to speed as fast as possible through the sheer amount of content. There is too much to be asked of the students, professor, and TAs in only 10 weeks. I think that this demand created a high pressure environment within the class that could be felt by everyone this quarter. The speed of the class ended up causing a lot of disorganization on Rilley’s end from the amount of work that was asked of her. There were corrections to corrections for problem sets, lots of emails sent out, and we just got our grades back the first day of spring quarter with no feedback on the final. I think that the best thing to do when it comes to 14D is just to power through it no matter the professor because it’s gonna suck just because of the way the syllabus is designed. Just dedicate a little bit of time every day to study and review and stay as optimistic as possible about it. Also DONT DROP IT! You can always retake it if you don’t pass but you will still get into med school no matter what I promise

EXAMS (75%, 25% each)
-We had the opportunity to have our lowest mt dropped and replaced by the higher one but I know that she won’t do this in the future
-The average for the 1st mt was a 69% and for the 2nd it was a 57%
-It was really hard to know exactly what to study since many of the problems were nowhere near the level that we would see on the exams
-All 3 were online open notes/book which means we didn’t have to completely memorize all the reactions, this will definitley not be happening anymore
-100+ people dropped after the 2nd midterm
-According to her the class is then curved to a B- average

BACON 🤢 (10%)
-Really just busy work that took 5-10 mins each they need to get rid of this
-There were around 8-10 modules we had to do and the lowest 2 were dropped but she ended up changing to the lowest 4 because she realized it was stupid

PROBLEM SETS (15%)
-there was a problem set due before each exam for completion
-answer keys were always posted before they were due

EXTRA CREDIT
-there was a decent amount of extra credit available that probably increased your grade a couple %s

The worst professor I’ve had at ucla. She’s extremely disorganized. How am I supposed to learn when she can’t answer her own practices exams correctly?? How am I supposed to keep up with the deadlines when she can’t keep up with the ones she promised herself?? I feel that the other posts have said enough. Very disappointed because I actually found the content kinda cool. She ruined it

Dr. Reilly should not be allowed to teach this course ever again, and I am horrified for others' sake that she is teaching it next quarter. First of all, her lectures were a mess. She seemed to have no coherent order, wrote all of her mechanisms in a messy and hard to read fashion, and often went off on tangents. Much worse than her lectures were her exams and her exam prep (if you can even call it that). Her answer keys for her practice problems were always wrong, with her posting multiple corrected versions every time and making literally no effort to alleviate our confusion even hours before exams. She posted her practice midterm for the first midterm FOUR HOURS before the actual midterm and at 10 pm before the second midterm. Does she think we don't sleep and don't have any other obligations other than sitting around for her to post things whenever she feels like it? I even brought this up to her and her actual response to me was "All of you kept bugging me about the answer keys being wrong so I couldn't post the practice midterm until later". Excuse me??? Then, we get to her exams. They were RIDICULOUSLY hard (especially midterm 2), so hard that neither of the averages were passing scores. Instead of maybe stepping back and realizing that her exams were too hard, Dr. Reilly decided that the problem must be US, not her. She actually told us that all of us are not studying correctly and lectured us on study habits. I honestly don't know how she can think that SIX HUNDRED people are failing a test because we all "don't know how to study". She refuses to acknowledge that she is the common denominator here. I am so furious at what all of us have had to endure in this class. Most of us want to go to medical school, and it's important that we understand and do well in OChem. Dr. Reilly has been a major impediment to these goals, and she has truly made a hard class a hundred times harder.

I feel like I know more about Reilly's dog than I do ochem and her kid. I didn't even know that she had a kid until one morning she sent out an email about not being able to make it to class because of her kid's covid vaccine appointment. She is extremely disorganized and does not provide us with the practice midterms until the day before the actual exam. She even confessed that she was still writing the midterm 2 hours before we were supposed to take it. This is unacceptable. Bruh if you are having problems at home Reilly, just say that and don't take it out on the class.

Reilly seems like a very nice person, like I would love to grab lunch with her, but that's where the positivity ends. Honestly, I'm not gonna go into too much depth as I think most of the bruin walk reviews are pretty solid on here. Essentially, this class was awful this quarter. The hybrid model was terrible and I think Chem 14D just needs to be restructured entirely. My biggest point of contention was the uncertain grades as here scheme was constantly changing and impossible to follow. In the end, take this class with another prof if you can and if not, realize that if you are only covering Elimination and Substitution by week 4, the rest of the quarter will be HELL! Goodluck with this one if you do decide to take this class, because it's not like you have a choice as pre-meds anyway 😢 I guess she has cool dogs though.

One of the worst professors i’ve encountered in the department. Professor Reilly is very knowledgeable in the content she teaches which is why I cannot understand how terrible her exams are. Both midterms were way more difficult than the practice material she provides. With class averages as low as 57 percent, she refuses to acknowledge that she is the issue and not the students. Practice exam keys have so many errors in them that you can expect to see up to four corrections be uploaded. Even more frustrating, she post a practice midterm just hours before the exam. When she is called out on her mistakes, she dismisses them with a simple, “try harder next time” Do yourself a favor and take a more organized professor who shows they care.

The best way I can describe Reilly is: She's like that one unreliable friend we've all had at some point--the type of person who makes all of these big promises but never follows through on them. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS WITH REILLY. I've had many mental breakdowns over this class and feel so lost, but this could all have been solved if Reilly were just more organized, actually kept her word, and wrote tests that reflected the level of difficulty of our practice problems. As my other classmates have already mentioned, Reilly never posts things on time; answer keys (which have contained WRONG answers) have been posted DAYS after she initially promised they would be sent out. Practice midterms were released the DAY BEFORE the midterms, with answer keys being sent out on the day OF the midterm. Even midterm scores were released late; speaking of which, our averages were 69% and 57%, respectively, and Reilly blamed US for bad study habits instead of realizing that her tests were far too difficult for what she had prepared us for. On top of this, discussion sections were useless, as every single week, over 1/2 of the week's worksheet contained topics she hadn't covered in class yet. While Reilly seems like a very kind person, she's FAR from being a kind professor. Save yourself the pain and take this class a different quarter if she's teaching.