You won't learn anything about chemistry in her lectures. She goes off on tangents for her love of rocks and physics concepts. At the beginning of the quarter, she told us that we'd be focusing on quantum mechanics and that it'd be an important topic, just to not have any questions on the final covering that topic. Kavner admitted that she hadn't written the final until 2 days prior, and it's obvious the TA's do everything for her. She's lazy for sure, from a teaching standpoint.

This review is going to sound exactly like every other review. Kavner is an amazing person, and I'm sure for any topic that she knew the content she would be a great professor. However, there's a reason Epsi teachers teach Epsi and not Chemistry. You don't learn much in lectures or in class at all, but it's very easy to still get an A without knowing any Chemistry. You're paying for the degree so take this class to boost your GPA, but learn the content on your own because you're most likely not learning it in class.

Basically every class had no clue what was going on. Half of the questions on the midterm were not related to what we had learned. But grading system was so heavy on worksheets and participation that somehow ended with an A

Kavner is a nice person, and I believe she wants to help her students. However, I also believe she is one of the worst teachers I have ever had. She is extremely disorganized, with the lectures, homework, and reading often all being about different topics and having no connection whatsoever. Her lectures jump around to different topics and don't follow her lesson plan even remotely. The lectures are impossible to follow, as she goes on random tangents and assumes you have seen all of the topics before. She explains everything as if she is simply reviewing it and you have already learned it. On tests, problems will appear on topics that she has never taught or even mentioned before. In order to do well on tests in this class, you must teach almost all of the material to yourself, as her lectures seem almost pointless to even attend. If you have any choice on whether to take this class or not, don't. The only positive of this class is the fact that her grading scheme is relatively generous.

Kavner is a very very nice person, especially if you approach her and ask for help. The concepts themselves weren't too hard, she just isn't good at explaining, so I would recommend finding your own resources or working with others. She is good at explaining if you go to office hours, just not during lectures. If you want to learn the material well and really understand it, she's not the best professor to take the class with, but getting an A is definitely doable, especially with the grading scheme labeled below. I only needed a 65 to get an A in the class which was a 95 or higher and my midterm average wasn't even that good.

I definitely got very frustrated with her but if you go to office hours with TAs, Homeworks are much more doable. Also, I came in as an applied math major. I would not take this class again unless you need to for your major.

Grading Scheme (When I took the class):
30% homework (you have once chance to redo it and there are often extra credit problems, you work on the homework during section).
25% 2 midterms (these were on bruinlearn, and you did not have to take it in lecture)
25% final (in-person)
20% participation based quizzes (you get full credit just for doing them)
**she adds an extra 10% for the online homeworks from the textbook because you have to be subscribed to BruinOne Access to have access to this specific part of the textbook that includes online assignments
Total = 110%

Don't take this class if you don't need to; at best it'll do no harm.
Like everyone else says, Prof. Kavner is very sweet, sometimes funny, and I sincerely believe she is trying her best. Unfortunately, her best is not very good when it comes to teaching this class, both in terms of clarity and organization. Lectures feel very under prepared, and do not match up with problem sets. Topics are either under explained or repeatedly explained in excruciatingly unnecessary detail.
The class is poorly organized, with quizzes broken more often than not, repeated lectures, problem sets posted late, and constantly changing assignments.
Students who had a good foundation in chemistry and physics from high school were able to score well despite not learning anything at all, partially because there is a ton of extra credit (class was graded out of 110%) and homework made up a lot of the grade. Students without these foundations were not so lucky.

Just a heads up to everyone: I have been told that Professor Kavner reads all the bruinwalk reviews.

I will agree with the other reviewers in that I learned absolutely nothing in this class. I have no idea how I even got an A in this class. If you took AP Chem, you will think everything is fine until Week 4, when the class enters the land of physics. From that week onward, you will play a game called "Find the electron(s)?" for the rest of the quarter. If you want further proof on how lost the majority of the class was, go to r/ucla and look up "Kavner Chem 20A".

About the class: I think there was an attempt at organization in the class. I did appreciate the overviews that she posted each week with the objectives she wanted to cover in class. Plug the objectives into ChatGPT on Monday & generate an overview of the topics so you have an idea of what's going on. If you do the owlV2 assignments on time, do the problem sets each week, watch the lectures, and read the textbook you can gain some understanding each week. The textbook is mind numbingly boring and hard to get though. However, I think the biggest issue with the class are the problem sets & lectures. The lectures need to correspond with what is in the problem sets - I understand there is a lot of material in the class, but she does not use lecture time adequately. She needs to spend more time discussing examples of the concepts/problems that are in the problem sets. I would have appreciated her posting the slides ahead of time as well - the course slides should be improved & example problems should be added to it.

With that being said, Kavner is a nice person & I do appreciate her showing up at 8am for lecture. I'm sure she's trying her best, but the lecturing in this class needs to be improved.

Although I received an A, I learned absolutely nothing in class. My last chemistry class was 10th grade, and I learned more from my terrible 10th grade teacher than professor Kavner. She would go over absolutely nothing in lecture. None of it was useful or related to the homework. I don't even know why I attended lecture at 8 am every day. There was no use. I did not pay attention at all. However, sometimes she would give participation quizzes during lecture. These would be open in the morning until sometimes noon, so you could do the quiz at another time anyway. Lecture was recorded.

Homework was manageable and weighed heavily but none of it related to lecture. I had no idea how to do it and would have to look online. It was due at the end of the day on Friday. Sometimes, she would post homework in the middle of the week and still made it due Friday. Attendance wasn't taken in discussion and was simply a homework working period. My TA would give an overview of how to do each problem on the homework and left us to work on homework ourselves after. All of the students would complain to the TA about how bad of a professor Kavner is. One student said to the TA, "To be honest, I learn through Chat GPT." There were also textbook assignments called OWLs, which were SO LONG. These were counted as 10% extra credit. However, she was constantly changing the grade distribution and never clarified what this extra 10% meant, so I had no idea what the grading scheme was. An A was 95-99%.

There were 2 midterms that were both online and MCQ. These were okay, and the averages were really high. The final was in person MCQ, and I guessed the entire thing. I don't know what I got but still received an A.

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.