Professor/Lectures - Professor Pfluegl's lectures are all online, so I actually ended up never seeing him in person. If I remember correctly, the link to the lectures are posted every week on CCLE, but the online lectures are on his separate ls23l website, too. His accent is a little hard to understand, but there are subtitles and you can adjust the speed as preferred, as well.

Grading system (in LS 1) - Total: 500 points (I think the score distributions might be different each quarter, so I'll try not to add them, because there might be some confusion).
**Straight scale grading (might normalize to account for different sections)

Online Quizzes - Consists of pre-lab quizzes and post-lab quizzes that are 5 multiple choice questions based on accuracy. These were pretty simple with only a few detailed questions at times. Your lowest pre-lab quiz and post-lab quiz will be dropped for the quarter. I think 2 or 3 of the "quizzes" are courselets, which were based on completion for my quarter. Courselets were an interactive way to really understand the concepts behind some of the labs.

Discussion/Participation - You have to speak in front of the class about one of the conceptual questions you are assigned to. I remember some people in my class gave really short presentations, so the TA told everyone to try to make 1-2 minute presentations. You might want to confirm with your TA about the time when you decide to present. These were only 6 points out of the 500 points for my quarter, but not getting every point could be a grade-breaker. Participation is basically filling out the evaluations at the end of the quarter.

Exams - There is only one major test and that is a one-hour final 40 questions long. They also gave a sample exam that you could take up to three times. The final was mostly based on the pre-lab quizzes and post-lab quizzes, so make sure to study those. Maybe, if you have time to, try to skim through the entire lab manual and really understand why you're using a certain chemical, so on so on. I think conceptual understanding helped me way better than rote memorization.

Textbook - For this class, the lab manual is all that matters. I think it was $30 at the UCLA store, which I think is pretty fair. You definitely need this in order to the labs correctly and prepare for the pre-lab quizzes and post-lab quizzes.

In-Lab Quizzes and Assignments - Like the online quizzes, in-lab quizzes are also based on accuracy and worth 5 points for almost every lab. Your lowest in-lab quiz score is dropped, as well. These were pretty straightforward multiple choice questions, much like the pre-lab quizzes.
The assignments are worksheets based on "accuracy," but you have (at most) 2 other group members and a whole class (my group would sometimes ask around about some of the questions) to figure out what's up. If no one in your group or class understands, you can also ask the TA (which we also did a lot). Most of the time, it's completion-based, except for the occasional -0.5 or -1 for REALLY incorrect answers (thus the air quotes). I thought having a good lab group was definitely important because slacking off definitely doesn't help you with filling out the worksheet. Make sure to read the lab manual beforehand. Also, the rat dissection lab and the histology lab were the only two labs that were based on actual accuracy (the rat dissection lab, especially, was definitely quiz-style). You work with your lab group for all worksheets (except for Lab J, which is an online "lab").

CPR Assignments - This is the notorious CPR assignment that many people don't like, not only because of its strictness (the calibrations are pass or fail for each of the 3 calibrations, you can re-do them once if you don't get the points the first time) but because your grade is dependent on your classmates, for the most part. I think you can complain to the professor about a lousy grader, but I heard that regrades were pretty strict. Be sure to follow the rubric, and read the prompts carefully when your grading other people's essays, too!

LS23L is actually an interesting and engaging course. First off, here is the breakdown of how the course runs:

There are 10 three-hour labs throughout the quarter. For these labs, there are pre-lab, in-lab, and post-lab quizzes that are definitely doable as long as you skim through the lab manual before the class. During the labs, you are placed into groups of three to work together on the lab assignment, which includes actually carrying out whatever activity is chosen for that week and filling in either a group or individual worksheet that gets turned in at the end of the class. All of these are easy points that should buffer your grade.

There are also three CPR (writing) assignments worth different amount of points. This is where you write either a specific portion or the entirety of a scientific paper based on experiments conducted during lab. These assignments are actually peer-graded, and so as long as you follow the rubric guidelines and have good/fair reviewers, you should get an A or B on most of your assignments. That being said, if you feel like the grade you received does not accurately reflect your performance, you can contact the CPR coordinator or the professor himself who is surprisingly very receptive to concerns as long as they are legitimate. Go through the CPR coordinator FIRST and then the professor if the issue does not get solved the first time around.

Lastly, the final. I spent one day studying for the final (actually the day before), skimming through the lab manual, jotting down main points of each lab, and looking through all the quizzes I took. They also release a practice final, which is similar to the actual test you will take. Make sure to practice through those and you will be fine.

This is a cool course (maybe this is the nerdy side of me speaking) but the lab activities are not too difficult/actually fun and you get to work in a small group setting, which should make you feel at ease because there are people around you who can help you and you can socialize with. So look forward to taking this course and try to enjoy it as much as you can!

The course is pretty simple and a minimal stress class. You do the prelab quiz, you go to lab, you do the postlab quiz. Every couple of weeks you complete a CPR writing assignment, which is useful for learning scientific writing skills, as well as learning to critique others. This critique really does make your paper better, you learn to be less lenient with others, and also more strict on yourself. However, sometimes your papers are graded very harshly and your self grading is thrown out as too far off, and sometimes when critiquing other people's papers, the other students are too lenient so your grade is thrown out as too harsh! It can be very frustrating that a large portion of your grade depends on the efforts (or lack thereof) of 3 randomly selected students. The calibrations are especially difficult to get within range as well. Dr. Pfluegl is a fine professor; due to the nature of the class there is really no need to ever see him unless you have a question your TA absolutely cannot answer. His online lectures are well structured and self explanatory, and he is very open about students coming to him if they have any concerns, but this shouldn't really ever happen in this class, which is, again, pretty self explanatory. Overall, I have enjoyed this class and learned a lot, my only real issue is with the labs sometimes. Often, the labs do not need to take up the whole 3 hours, and the TAs and LAs are forced to fill it with busy work due to the policy of not leaving early, even when there is truly nothing else to do or learn.

The review below hit all the main points. I would just like to add a few things.
--Most of the questions can be found on quizlets. Most, not all.
--This lectures in this class are flipped lectures. That is, you watch a video of Dr. Pflugel before class, usually 20 minutes in length. The flipped lectures have all the content you need to know for what you are about to do in class. Dr. Pflugel himself does have an accent, but you should just want the flipped lectures with subtitles. The class lectures are headed by a TA. A lot of your grade in the class will be depend on your TA. As long as you participate, do the class worksheets with your lab group, you are pretty much set.
--Overall, the class is pretty easy, more busy work than actual work. CPR can be pretty annoying, simply cause people just give you a low score but will tell you that your work is fine. Just realize, that if you get an average of 6.67/10 from your peers grading your CPR assignment, and do everything else perfectly, that's already a 90% on the overall assignment!

The class is overall fun and doable for a person taking other hard and time consuming classes. It doesn't have a big workload. However, the CPR system is a killer. The professor thinks the CPR system is effective in teaching students how to write a research paper. That is absolutely not true. When grading other people's work you are only allowed to deviate from the mean by 2 units. So if the scale is out of 10 you are very likely to give most people a 6 so that you are in the range (no one will give it anything higher than 8 and most probably lower than 4) At the end you get your points because other people grading that person's work also gave it something around 6, but the person whose work you graded did an awesome job but still lost 4 points because of you. You can't blame the grader because they were just trying to be safe and grade it in a way to remain within the range. This is not the right learning environment. The students' writing does not improve they just learn how to grade other people's work to remain in the range. If you attempt to request a regrade for your work the professor will look at your work and try to regrade it (you're most likely not gonna get a regrade, just a feedback directing you to the resources on CCLE). but how effective is the professor going to be grading your paper if he hasn't looked at anybody else's work? Professor needs to have an understanding about the entire classes' performance to grade your work based on how well you did in comparison with the class. Otherwise, someone might have done a worse job than you did, but was lucky to be graded by students who didn't care and gave them a high grade.

Selling 6th edition lab manual for $25 and the 4th edition for $7. Email: *************

I took this class Fall 2018 and ended up with an easy A.
The CPR assignments are truly annoying. I did not do well on them overall (6/10, 7/10, 9.5/10), so I thought my grade would suffer. There is so much pre/during/post lab stuff that is easy to get 100’s on that it didn’t make any kind of difference for the final grade — don’t stress.

They say they recommend you take this class while you take LS7C, but I disagree. Take it later. The bs from this class might confuse you.

I didn’t find the videos/“lectures” helpful so i didn’t watch them. Just skim that day’s lab in the lab book before lab.

This final was easy multiple choice (I just skimmed the lab manual and looked at the online quizlets).

My TA (Alonso) was great. This class is heavily TA dependent, I would assume, since they are the ones with you in the lab.

LS23L was not difficult, but the PCR is NOT a fair system and really takes a toll on your overall grade. The labs aren't very interesting, but they are easy to complete and you don't need to do a lot of prep for them. If you are taking this class, it's probably a requirement, so it won't take up a lot of your time or be super difficult, but just be weary of the PCR assignments and focus on those.

This class should be an easy A with the adjustments that Dr. Pfluegl has made. For one, he drops the lowest grade in all sections of the class (pre-lab, in-lab, post-lab quizzes, as well as lab worksheets.) Secondly, the lab worksheets are relatively easy and do not really require prior knowledge of the material. As long as you follow the lab manual, you should be good to go. Moreover, pre-lab, in-lab and post-lab quizzes can be found online.
A big component of the class is the CPR assignments. There are 3 CPR assignments on the labs done in class. One of them calls for students to write the first half of a research paper, the second one has to do with the second half while the third one is a full research paper. A big part of CPR assignments is peer review. Even with an average text grade, a perfect peer review grade can really bring up the assignment score. The professor does offer extra credit that increases text rating by 5 points (out of 10). So, if you get anything above a 5 as a text rating, your score can be boosted up to full points.
The final exam is pretty easy and you can score well just by reading through the lab manual once or twice before taking the exam.

This was a great class if you’re interested in the material. It was also quite easy bc all answers and good study material for quizzes were available if you looked for them!
I’m also selling the newest edition (6th I think) of the lab manual for $20. If interested, text me at **********