Courey is absolutely the best human being and professor ever! I am so thankful for being able to take his 14B class as this is his first time teaching it. He is genuinely a kind person who wants ALL his students to succeed and provides a lot of opportunities to do that. His lectures are super engaging with lots of clicker questions that he came up with and he posts his slides (unlike the terrible lavelle) and his exams aren't too difficult or deadly because he gives you all the resources you need to study! His office hours are extremely helpful!!
Once again, I'm super lucky to have Courey as my 14B professor! He's really awesome and I would take as many chem classes with him as possible! He's an awesome professor and person and really helpful. There isn't too much work for this class, just stay on top of things!
Best chem class yet- he made chem enjoyable!! 20/10 would recommend!

there’s pros and cons to this class so ill just list them out:

pros:
- all lectures are recorded; there’s clicker questions during lecture however but you only need to complete 70% of them and they’re only based on participation. if you miss them there’s a way to make up those points every week.
- midterms were pretty easy and straightforward and he gives you two hours to complete them. use discussion worksheets, la workshops, lecture slides, and the practice midterms to study for this. there’s also a group portion of the midterm which can help raise your score.
- students were given 1% extra credit for filling out some surveys which really helped in the end
- overall courey is a really caring professor and very helpful during OH and will listen to student concerns if they’re brought up to him

cons:
- midterms had to be taken at a specific time (for us it was 7-9 pm)
- we had 3 prwa assignments (peer review writing assignments) where we basically had to write short essays on a given chemistry topic. writing these wasn’t too terrible but the professor doesn’t grade these your peers do and then you get graded on how well you graded someone else. i personally found these assignments very tedious and time consuming.
- discussion is 2 hours long and if you didn’t complete the discussion worksheet in section you have to meet with your group outside of section to complete it. they were mostly based on concepts we learned in class but some of these were just so long.
- workload for this class is very high compared to lavelles class. we have ptl quizzes that require you to do a bunch of reading review ppts and watch videos before taking them (theyre not timed and you get three attempts on them so they’re not as bad as they sound) i got away with not doing the reading in this class we also have three cmc quizzes that were sometimes difficult because a lot of it consisted of true/false questions

content wise the course is definitely difficult especially if you hate thermodynamics like I did. but courey did a really good job at doing the best he could at helping us understand the material and providing a lot of resources to study. The final did screw me over very badly but he did end up curving it and curved the class slightly at the end so it ended up working out.
This class is definitely a lot more work than lavelles class but I do think courey is a lot more lenient with grading and less weight is put on our assessments but do not take this class just because you think it’ll be easier because it was definitely not easy will guarantee make you cry once a week.

I feel so blessed for having him as a professor. He has all it takes to be an excellent professor or even a father (not completely sure about the latter, just feeling like saying it). He delivers lectures flawlessly with his casual laugh and jokes. His tests are fair, straight forward, and less brain-damaging than Tienson's 153A. If he mentions a certain problem from the problem set, do it cuz it'll be the midterm!

Professor Courey was, without doubt, the best professor I have had during my time here at UCLA. He is very passionate about teaching, and it shows when he lectures.

He posts the PowerPoints for lectures ahead of time, and there is a quiz that corresponds with almost each PowerPoint. You have unlimited attempts on these quizzes, and to encourage you from guessing your way through these quizzes, he awards you a point of extra credit for each quiz that you get a 9/10 or higher on in under 2 attempts.

His first midterm was pretty hard, and time was extremely limited. However, he realized this, and allowed us to gain back some of the points we missed. Also, he made the second midterm significantly easier, and I think it was because of the feedback he received on the first midterm.

The final was not super easy, but he was very understanding of the circumstances, considering it was during the whole coronavirus frenzy. He made it optional, but if you were to take it, you had ample time to do it. In addition, he allowed us to collaborate on it, and gave us the opportunity to earn 10 points extra credit on it.

We had weekly homework due, but these were graded on effort, and we would go over some of the problems with an LA in our discussion, which clarified the concepts well.

Overall, Professor Courey is a gem, and I would definitely take a class with him if I could!

Dr. Courey was such a sweet professor. He reminded me of an uncle-type figure you'd see at a family reunion who would sneak candy to you behind your mom's back, or something like that. The workload is rough, though. I'm not a biochemistry major (I'm a physiological science student that took a core class for an elective, silly me), but I thought the information came really hard and fast and it was difficult to keep up, especially when I had to deal with my other classes too. That being said, Courey presents the material very clearly, so I didn't feel too behind compared to the other people in the class and ended up finishing the quarter with an A.

Make sure you do the extra credit poetry assignment, and definitely find a study buddy early on in the course. I think I would've done much worse had I not found a solid friend to stick with me through the tough times before the midterms and final.

If you like DNA replication and the central dogma of molecular biology, this class is for you! :-)

TLDR: do not take this class

Grade Breakdown:
PTL Quizzes (pretty easy 100%): 8%
Mastering Chemistry weekly hw (pretty easy 100% if you put in some effort): 4%
CMC (there are 3 and all of them are pretty challenging: class avg was around 60-70%): 9%
CPR (there are 2 and it's pretty easy to get an A if you put in some work): 7%
POGIL (group-based worksheets): 8%
Participation (need to attend 2/3 of lecture): 3%
Survey (3 MANDATORY SURVEY): 1%
2 Midterms: 30%
Final: 30%

As you can see, you are self-studying and finishing so many assignments that takes HOURS to complete just for assessments to be almost 70% of your grade. If you do not like to self study please do not take this class because Professor Courey frequently skips slides because he expects you to already know the material beforehand. If you want to get a decent grade, you have to put in so much work into the class. Even though I got an A in this class, I was spending more time with this class than my two other major-required stem classes COMBINED. If you want to do well on the midterms and the finals, I suggest you rewatch the entire lectures on 1.5/2x speed because his midterms and final only cover the material he goes over in lectures. On top of that, review all lecture slides, POGILs, PTLs, and do the practice midterms/final. Do not do the LA workshop worksheets if you don't want to waste your time. I didn't do a single one, and I was fine for all the assessments. His midterms and final are easier than the CMCs because most of them are just plug and chug with some tricky T/F or multiple choices that he went over in lectures (again, rewatch the lecture videos!). Also Professor Courey does not offer extra credit, and I don't think he's going to curve the class. If you mess up on one of the midterms/final, it's hard to recover. A lot of students are not happy with this class, and so am I. You are better off with taking 14B because your life will be so much easier.

Professor Courey is incredible. If given the chance do not pass up taking 153B with him. He gives you everything you need to succeed. Very available through office hours and will often send reminders out to make sure people stay on track.

I didn't think the material of this class was particularly interesting past the first midterm (really liked the DNA topology section) and the material for the final was definitely a struggle to get through because I found it very boring. That said, the finals are perfectly and doable if you go through the lectures and do the practice tests. Our average for the 1st midterm was kind of low at a 66% but midterm 2's average was probably much higher. I scored in the A range for both midterms by just doing the practice tests, going through the lectures, and doing some problem set questions here and there.

To get the A (which is tougher than you think because there are no curves in this class) you really have to nail the quizzes and homework because that's 20% of your grade that you can easily, easily miss by being lazy on the homework and quizzes. You do get to drop 2 quizzes though so that's a nice bonus. Also I strongly recommend doing all of the cold call discussions because you will often be able to squeak by without saying anything so it is easy participation points.

Overall, Professor Courey is an amazing professor. Take 153B with him.

Courey is such a cool professor. He really knows the material and is very good about answering all your questions. He also has a cute personality--really jokey but soft-spoken.

The tests are pretty fair. He tells you exactly what you should know on the lecture slides.

Just take him.

For a lack of better words..... this class was a hot mess. Given that it was a pilot class, I went in expecting a lot of accommodation and preparation for learning -- but that was certainly not the case at all. My TA was wonderful and super responsive so he was great. I genuinely hated coming to this class' lectures. It consisted of CMC quizzes, Two midterms, POGIL group worksheets, PTL quizzes, Homework, Peer Review Assignments and other small assignments alongside the final. I found the professor to be very elitist and non-accommodating on a personal basis. The CMC quizzes were SO hard. Midterms were pretty doable, and I did fairly decent. The final however, in the words of Rap Queen Nicki Minaj, was "yikes". Genuinely, that final traumatized me. Albert was not very responsive to student concerns, although he did end up curving the class because like 90% dropped letter grades due to the final. This class sounds so nice on paper, but at times I felt like I was at a funeral for my GPA. Prof skips slides a lot and just like expects us to know material on them??? HUH??? The LA workshops were so different from Chem 14AE and threw me off so hard, we would just sit there and review things instead of finishing up worksheets together and learning. I definitely hope the chem department either just discards this chem series or reforms it to make it actually beneficial to students and the same level of difficulty as 14B -- it is not supposed to be 5x harder. The POGILs became longer and longer each week, and one time my group spent 5 hours AFTER 2 hour discussion to finish it. I will give Dr. Courey credit where credit is due, however, as he will try to be somewhat just about assignment deadlines and he is an intelligent guy. We are living through a pandemic -- it is extremely unfortunate that we did not get more support and accommodation. I would genuinely not recommend this class to anyone, it made me reconsider a career in anything remotely-science related.

A lot of people are leaving harsh reviews based on the intensity of the final, so I'm gonna give a non-biased review of the course.

Courey is a fairly good professor. He explains the concepts pretty well and his slides have a lot of content (the textbook reading isn't necessary because of this). However, he often will skip/quickly go over slides that have important info, so make sure you review all the slides from the lectures and ask questions if you don't understand. Courey always does his best to answer student questions during office hours (he usually goes overtime if there are more questions) and hosts additional office hours for Q&A sessions about the exams/written assignments. Also, sometimes we got a little behind in schedule, which made it difficult to understand the pre-lecture assignments (we were doing pre-lecture assignments for future lessons without even finishing the current ones). Nevertheless, it was still manageable. This was the first time 14BE has been offered, so I think there will be improvement in the future.

The workload is genuinely not bad. The "enhanced" part of this course was to provide students extra opportunities to understand the material, and that is exactly what all of the assignments do. Yes some are time consuming, but for someone with no chemistry background before college, having structured activities were really helpful to assist me in understanding the material. Also, the PRWAs are not as bad as people make them out to be: the first one was like 3 simple questions (explanation/calculation), the second was a 250 word paragraph explanation of a concept, and the third was a 500 word essay that was BASED ON a biochem concept, but we were only asked to explain it relative to the content we learned in class and all the necessary information to understand it was provided.

The midterms were relatively easy. My TA told us that Courey specifically made the final harder because of the easiness of the midterms. Once again, cut him some slack; it's the first time this course has ever been done and he made accommodations once he saw how people performed. He made it out of 88 points instead of 100 and changed the grade breakdown so that a 91%+ was an A and an 88-90% (I think) was considered and A-. Personsally, I think this was a decently fair curve (still trying not to be biased - I literally got an F on the CCLE portion).

Overall I still would prefer this class over 14B. Courey is a nice professor who wants his students to learn and understand the material. Yes the content in itself is challenging, but I think Courey does a good job at teaching it.