Please note the following bias in my review: Many people (inclusive) were curved *down* at the end of the course since "students overall performed too well" based on the grading scheme that Gelbart provided at the beginning of the quarter. Your grade is not safe. Ever.

I continued the honors chemistry series because I saw that Professor Gelbart had a 5.0 from previous ratings, and was very excited to go in-depth about kinematics, acids and bases, and energy. I was rather disappointed by the learning outcomes of this quarter.

While Gelbart did provide adequate-ish resources (in the form of his lecture notes), he stated (verbatim) that he "would not cover entire lectures worth of notes" and instead "pick a few examples from each lecture to go in-depth". This meant that we were often left under-equipped (if only attending lectures) for problem sets. While he would certainly go in-depth into certain concepts he deemed worthy, he often made mistakes in his derivations, and would require corrections from other students who had pre-read the lecture notes.

Additionally, this class barely touched upon acids and bases, which was covered in-depth in the non-honours counterpart, which leaves you less equipped to do problems if you plan on continuing the chemistry series.

Furthermore, even though this class met *every single day*, we did not cover all the content. Not even close, in fact. Discussions were non-existent, and used to push Gelbart's views on science in political spaces and advertise his educational campaigns. While these were great for framing science in the real world, they didn't help prepare us for testing at all, nor were they usually even related to class content.

If Chem 20B is the last class you ever have to take and you LOVE statistical mechanics, then this class is great. If you don't care about your grade and want to do derivations, this class is for you. If you love tackling real-world issues regarding scientific education and perception, this class is for you. If you said no to any of the above, take 20B. It's magnitudes easier and you may actually learn something.

I never really leave reviews for classes but I think this one deserves it.

As a chem/math person who find it satisfying to derive everything about a topic from scratch, this was the class for me. Starting from a few postulates we were able to derive a lot about thermo and stat mech, the latter of which I found extremely interesting. I would say Gelbart's teaching style as slow, with the potential ramp up to what feels like a million miles an hour in a split second. He would constantly think for 2-3 minutes on a derivation before checking the class notes and suddenly speeding off sometimes without explaining himself. But to be honest, if you took decent notes and had the lecture notes—which he always posted—then it was doable.

I think this is a great class for people who want are interested in the mathematical definitions and derivations of thermo, but maybe not for those who simply want a good grade. To be honest, the people who read the lecture notes before hand—which he advised us not too—made the class less appealing t because they would blurt out the answer that was on their laptop and not give others a chance to think about the correct answer. The HW was in my opinion the best part of this class and it getting the correct answer was based heavily upon your intuition and understanding of thermo topics—in other words, the HW's were also usually derivations. Gelbart himself is a wonderful teacher to be around, and always gave us plenty of office hours where we would offer to make students coffee and break down and challenging concepts he had taught in class. The midterm was basically a repetition of the HW up to that point, but the final had more challenging problems which I actually enjoyed thinking about. I think a lot of students were critical of this class because it could become unorganized at times, and because Gelbart lowered the grades at the end, but honestly, I don't think a class has given me an as in depth understanding on anything at UCLA than 20BH did on thermo. Bottom line: If you're interested in the mathematical postulates of thermo and stat mech, this is the class for you—if its not something you're passionate about, dont. :)