Lavelle is a meme and he knows it. He will flex about Chemistry Community and his HOURS of additional support before the midterm and final. He will make random comments during class, then get an entire lecture hall to laugh for him. But underneath this meme, he is a sneaky man. He gives off the illusion that he wants to help you, then writes a final that purposefully screws you over.

If you took AP Chem in high school, the class content will feel almost like a review. But if you didn't, Lavelle's got you covered. If the lectures were confusing or boring, he organizes a lot of UA sessions and review sessions to help (I personally didn't attend UA sessions but sometimes the UAs will put their review sheets in a Google Drive folder). His damn Chemistry Community ( I swear every lecture he has to brag about the amount of views he has gotten): kinda tedious having to submit posts every week but it can be useful if you are looking for explanations for certain HW problems. Lastly, the best way to prepare for the tests is to go over textbook questions. Sapling doesn't help as much (so I wouldn't recommend studying off of Sapling), but test questions are framed like textbook questions and have similar difficulty levels.
Overall, Lavelle was pretty accommodating considering COVID and the class was not as bad as many people make it out to be. Just utilize all the resources he gives you and you should be fine.

Professor Lavelle. The most helpful and bright-spirited chemistry professor you could have. He’s got office hours, discussion sections, review sessions in Week 10 for each branch of chemistry covered - 100+ hours of review in Week 10, to be precise! Even over asynchronous lectures, he was engaging, funny, and always reviewed the fundamental concepts before building on them. And Chemistry Community is awesome for homework help! I’ll be back for Chem 14B.

Sell the totally useless course reader and workbook. $30 or best offer. Contact me at **********.

Selling 7th edition pdf version of textbook for 20$ (1/4 the price)! Regular price at UCLA store for ebook is 80$! Text me @ **********

One of the questions on his final was "draw cisplatinum" something he never even mentioned in class, then he said it was on his slides but he DOES NOT POST HIS SLIDES. That was probably the most UNFAIR class I've ever taken and i didn't even think the material was hard, he just was awful and unfair. 10/10 DO NOT RECOMMEND AVOID IF YOU CAN OR TAKE SOMEONE ELSE, don't do this to yourself.

Overall, this is not an easy class and there is not a lot of room for error (you can get a total of 6 question wrong or 24 points off to get an A). That being said it is very doable! Dr. Lavelle had pretty good lectures. I know they are optional, but I'd highly highly recommend you go. If you don't you have to watch the recording. During lecture he gives some biological examples that show up on the test that can't be found in the textbook. Overall, the midterms were pretty easy, with our class having pretty high averages. The final on the other hand was pretty hard. The questions were longer and you definitely needed a deeper understanding of the material to get the questions. So don't let the midterms fool you for the final. As long as you study hard, do the textbook problems, and go to the UA sessions (I fit in 2-3 a week), you'll be fine. I'd recommend at the beginning on the quarter going to as many UA sessions as you can (before the material gets too difficult). It will help you get a better understanding of the class and it will help you narrow down which UA sessions you find to be the most helpful (and then continue going to those ones every week!). I think the biggest thing about this class is you need to set your self up for success and use all the resources Lavelle has available and there are so many. He does want you to succeed (and you definitely can!) just stay on top of the work and attend lectures, and you will be fine.

If you do have a choice between professors, I'd recommend Lavelle, one thing I have heard that differentiate him and others is that all of his tests are MCQ (so no partial credit) while other professors are often free response (meaning partial credit). Ultimately, I thought it was a good class and would recommend Lavelle.

if you took ap chem and understood the material, there's not much active learning to do except for some quantum chem concepts. i'd say coordination compounds or anything w ochem is slightly beyond the scope of ap chem. review easy memorization like shapes, polyatomic ions, strong acids & bases. lecture attendance not mandatory, felt slow and unengaging in-person, but bruincast sometimes didn't upload recorded lectures right after class so keep that in mind. discussion attendance is recorded and counted towards grades, but it's online on zoom so many (including myself) zone out. as long as you read through the slides at least once, you should be fine. 3-4 days of studying (textbook problems and practice exams, not hw) 2ish hours per day before midterms and for a week before finals should ideally get you an A if you can lock in. never went to office hours of any sort, chemistry community feels tedious and lwk frustrating when people snipe your answer w incorrect info, but you should take advantage of the abudance of resources and materials provided. professor is really sweet and funny, the class is just a gen chem class so nothing too exciting but just know it's not really an "easy A".

Lavelle is definitely a teacher that you don't mind that you had, but would not want to be in a class with him again. While I did receive an A in the class, it came with needless self-studying on top of attending the lectures (to all future students, I recommend skipping lecture and just attending a UA review at least once weekly on top of textbook reading). His lectures were extremely boring and I often found myself struggling to stay awake. Course is basically a couple AP Chem units + quantum equations you don't have to conceptually understand, so pretty easy. I probably studied 25 hours for M1, 30 hours for M2, and 30 hours for the final, and not much beyond that. GO TO THE UA REVIEW SESSIONS, he pulls from content discussed there and not in the textbook.

Professor Lavelle is great! Would take again.

A lot of people in the review section are complaining about the exams, but I think they're not that bad and definitely doable if you study. The midterm 1 average was 88%, and for midterm 2 it was 92.6%, which is pretty good if you ask me. Midterm 1 was definitely harder but that's because the quantum unit is just hard; the class definitely gets easier after that. They're reasonable, there's nothing that we haven't discussed in class, and there aren't trick questions. Lavelle isn't intentionally trying to fail anyone.

(Edit: I wrote the above before grades for the final came out. The average was 79%, and the median was 83%... It was definitely harder than the midterms, some questions were really confusing and had some content that we didn't really cover in class, and overall the final just sucked. But I'd still say that Lavelle is a good professor overall.)

Lavelle's lectures have everything you need to know in them; I barely read the textbook, and I was fine. It does help that I took AP Chem before this, though. I will admit, lectures can be boring at times, but Lavelle tries so hard to be funny with his dad jokes, I have to give him credit. Lectures are all recorded; attendance at lectures is not mandatory. Discussions have mandatory attendance, but for this quarter all discussions were online so I just tuned out.

Mandatory assignments consist of 4 Chemistry Community posts per week, attending discussion, and a handful of Achieve textbook problems, which don't take long. I would recommend doing the optional textbook assignments because he often uses a variation of those problems on the exams. I also recommend going to the UA sessions if you want more practice.