I remember listening to Kavner talk the first day of class and feeling so excited for the quarter... boy did I get an inaccurate impression! This is coming from someone who did science bowl and had chem as my favorite science all throughout high school. I can now confidently say I will be avoiding any extra chem classes since this class gave me absolutely no foundation to build from. While yes on paper it is easy to get an A in this class, and I did even though I was lost most of the time, do not think that this class is easy because of that. Homeworks would take super long and very few people would be able to help since nobody has any idea what is going on. Kavner is super nice and I really wanted to like the class, but we would cover some topics for several weeks and others wouldn't even be touched on. The midterms were online and multiple choice which was nice, assignments and due dates were switched up a lot and could have been organized better. Good luck if you are taking this class, it is definitely a growing experience and will teach you to teach yourself.

I learned pretty much nothing in this class. Ms. Kavner is a very nice woman, who is very energetic and clearly cares about teaching. However, like every other comment, she goes off on tons of tangents, and should not be teaching chem 20A.

I showed up to 0 lectures, spent nearly 0 time studying, and walked away with an A+ solely by doing the homeworks. If u are an engineering major, save your efforts and do something worth your time.

HORRIFIC CLASS YOU DON'T LEARN A THING. The class is objectively easy because hw is weighted so high however you feel as if you are learning nothing and lectures are actively useless and confusing. I had no clue what exactly was gonna be on the midterm or final because the textbooks and the lecture does not align and we aren't given great prep for the exams, like the practice final wasn't multiple choice but the final was... You learn more about Chemistry from oxtoby but that is the most time consuming part of class. Even the TA's were confused with how she was teaching this.

Unfortunately, Kavner is not a good lecturer on the material of Chem20A. Her first midterm had mistakes on it that she hadn't corrected after a month, and her final had a few mistakes on it too. If you've taken AP Chem before this, be prepared for this class to be extremely easy but frustrating to take. If you haven't taken AP Chem before this, then start praying to whatever you believe in.

Bad lecturer and a very good person which everyone agrees with. Homework had nothing to do with lectures; the lectures were nonsense half the time. Every single exam was multiple choice and the midterms were online. This is a class where you have the teach yourself the material, so hopefully you have some understanding of this class's material that you can start with. Would not recommend taking this class with her.

I really liked that this class was more of a physics-based approach to chemistry, and I liked how Kavner taught us many different ways of looking at the same thing - the behavior of atoms and molecules. I felt that this class was pretty intuitive, the tests and final were extremely fair, and there's no one area that I feel wasn't understandable. If I had any questions I just went to office hours, and the professor explained things well.

I agree somewhat with the general consensus that it's easy to get lost in the lectures, however, if you follow along in the textbook chapters and review the problem sets before lecture it's not confusing at all. There are so many opportunities for extra credit, the lectures are recorded, and the office hours are always helpful. Kavner is a great professor, and a great person.

The workload was very light, but Kavner honestly didn’t seem to understand the content very well. She would fixate on particular topics which interested her (but sometimes teach them wrong), and gloss over the important concepts which were on the worksheets and exams. Even having gotten an A+, I would not take this class with this professor again. I attended all her lectures and walked away from every one feeling like I was supposed to have learned something, but not knowing what.

Professor Kavner seems like a wonderful person who is very knowledgable and passionate about the subject. However, I and the classmates I spoke to all feel very unprepared and lost in the class. Her lectures do not cover much of the material, and she has a tendency to go on tangents about content way outside the scope of this class and what she can expect her students to understand. This means that we don't cover much of the material. We are very behind her outlined plan in the syllabus. She seems to expect a much higher base knowledge from her students, which is surprising as this is supposedly an intro chemistry class. Coming into the final, I have no clue what kinds of questions she will test us on or the format of the test, as do many of my classmates. We are all very stressed about the final and about the next class in the series. Additionally, the textbook is very unclear and does not communicate the content effectively at an intro level. The professor's assigned homework seemed at times very detached from content we were learning, and often felt like busywork rather than effective practice.

I believe that this instructor is very knowledgeable and well prepared, but lectures could benefit from time dedicated to what will be on the homework.

I think the scope and learning objectives need to be more outlined, and there need to be more clear resources to study such objectives. The textbook is minimally helpful and often was much more complex than what we were expected to know and therefore did not help much.