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.

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.

I feel like I learned little to nothing in her course. Used a lot of APCHEM knowledge to carry my way through the class. Attendance wasn't mandatory, midterms were take home, and final was in-person. Exam content felt fair but I did not feel prepared or knowledgeable AT ALL.

I think someone else wrote that Professor Kavner is a kind person but should not be a teacher, and that perfectly sums it up.

Someone else wrote that you won't learn anything about chemistry in her lectures: also true. Took this class Fall 2024 and I'm considering relearning all of the material myself (it's almost Spring 2025) because I genuinely didn't learn anything. Lecture participation matters despite them being entirely pointless (criminal), discussion sections are also useless, and the only redeeming factor is that the grading is very lenient.

Kavner seemed like an extremely nice woman, however, she was not the most helpful professor. Her lectures often rambled to the point where it was incoherent as to what was actually being taught. However, the grading scheme was generous enough to where if you did what was asked of you, you'd assuredly pass. So if you're looking to genuinely understand Chem 20A, I would not recommend. Although, if you need to fulfill a requirement, this class is able to pass with a B.

Kavner would be a great grandmother, but she is a horrible professor. She is really nice, and clearly cares about how her students are doing, but the lectures are so unorganized that I genuinely came out of lectures more confused than when I went in. Somehow getting an A is so unbelievably easy that the class is actually a joke though. The homework is a lot at times, and finals and midterms are all "conceptual," but her grading scheme is so whack that it doesn't really matter.

To her credit, Professor Kavner seems to genuinely care about and want the best for her students. Unfortunately, this was still the most disorganized, poorly-taught, and confusing class I have ever taken. The problem sets, midterms, and lectures seemed to have no relation at all to one another.

The best way I can describe the lectures is that each one felt like an introductory lecture to an entirely different class; topics were briefly mentioned in vague qualitative ways as if they would be delved into properly later, but they rarely were. Some of the learning objectives mentioned at the beginning of each lecture were not covered at all, and rather than move through the content in a clear telegraphed fashion, she seemed to pick and choose what to teach at random, diving back deep fundamental basics that everyone understands while glossing over important high-level material and expecting us to follow.

The tests were also problematic, as it was never remotely clear what we were expected to know. Once, memorably, when asked if we needed to understand the VSEPR model, she hesitated before essentially saying "No, but it won't *not* be covered". She often does not even decide on the format of the test until days before, making it even more difficult to prepare in advance. She repeatedly talks loosely of "building intuition" and "furthering understanding", but this only makes the ineffectiveness of the lectures more frustrating.

DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS if there is any way at all you can avoid it. You will learn nothing.

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.