If you like fair grades and good learning environments, stay CLEAR of this professor. Not only is he incredibly condescending, it is very apparent that he hates teaching this course above all things in life, and no doubtedly expresses his frustration towards his students. He takes the stance that all his students are lazy and therefor incapable of learning, which is highly offensive if you are studying here at UCLA... If, however, you have no other option than to take his class, here is one tip. ATTEND ALL OFFICE HOURS. Quiz answers are given in office hours and you WILL NOT pass the quizzes on your own because the answers are usually not given in the reader, material, or are simply incorrect. And also study for the final on day one. Be able to do ALL of the practice exams by halfway through the course. This will boost your quiz scores and you will ace the final. He may be an expert in his field, but it is professors like him that make the learning experience at UCLA a joke. The epitome of the professor who is here for the research and is being made to teach. In summary, worst professor I have had in my entire educational career. Makes me so proud to be a bruin....

Prof. Bacher is nice and willing to help during OH, but I still feel that the final is ridiculously unfair. Neither the lab reports nor the quizzes truly prepare you for the final. (No midterm is NOT a good thing, in this case). I highly recommend taking this course immediately after 30A&B because he will test you on organic reactions that you do NOT perform in lab. (ie protective group chemistry, rearrangement chemistry, etc) It is extremely possible to have an A+ up to the final, having done all your own work the whole quarter, and then totally fail the final because the lab and the final are so disparate.

He does not provide spectra tables on the exam. This is again, ridiculous. He doesn't test your ability to analyze. He tests your ability to memorize peak numbers. Why. I don't know.

DO NOT IGNORE the exam book that comes with the other course readers. Take a peek and you'll see what kind of chemistry he tests on the final. Are they your in-lab recrystallizations, oxidations etc? NO. Sad for you.

DO NOT TAKE SPECTRAL ANALYSIS LIGHTLY. It's like 25% or more of the final. One of the questions will give 0/40 points if the final structure you come up with (after analyzing DEPT, HNMR, CNMR, and IR_ is incorrect. Seriously. No partial credit on a 40pt problem.

Took 30BL with Bacher Winter 2011. Selling his required readers for the class as well as my labs. If interested email me at *************.

If anyone has any Chem 30 BL lab notes/reports I would LOVE to purchase them from you! email me at *************

okey ahem goode morning, looks like haff o da class is still asleep somwhere, ai counted ve haf therty two people here out o sixty fife. so...nawt too much. welp okey cupple general things i wannta make comments bout:

(professor owns)

First thing's first. If 30AL is a 1 on the effort scale, 30BL is a 10. You would think it was a 6 credit course, but it’s only 3 credits. I would recommend taking 30B before taking this class because you will need to know NMR and IR spectroscopy inside-out, and you just don't have enough time in a quarter to learn it well enough for Bacher's taste (unless you have no life). As a warning, this class requires A LOT of time. For most weeks, you will have to:

1) Write your Prelab in your lab notebook by hand. The main bulk of points in this assignment comes from the Prelab questions, so make sure you ask your TA/Bacher for clarification. This may also involve the SPARTAN molecule visualization program, for which you will probably need to go to the CS computer lab in your own time to finish, since you get less than an hour to work on it during labs. Because you aren't allowed to take your lab manual into the lab, you will need to write out your whole procedure in your Prelab. Each Prelab is worth 5 points.

2) Write your Postlab in your lab notebook by hand. The majority of points in this comes from the Discussion. You will need to know each lab technique well to explain why your experiment didn't obtain a yield similar to the literature yield (which you probably never will get). You are also graded on the quality and quantity of product you made, so if you didn't get a good result in lab, you're not going to do very well on this. Hint: be good friends with someone who can make high quality products. Each Postlab is worth 5 points.

3) Do an online quiz, in which you have 4-5 answer choices. You will have to select all the correct answers, which is sometimes difficult as there are some answers that seem right and some that don't. I would advise having a friend do this with you, with one submitting the quiz before the other to see how many incorrect answers he/she had, then alternating roles the next week. The answers to the quiz are not posted after the quiz is completed (sadly), and you will have to go to Bacher's office hours to get them. Each online quiz is worth 10 points.

4) Study for your in-lab quiz. Not only will you need to read the green lab manual, but you will have to go through the orange survival kit. Know everything in there by heart, because some questions can be hard. I cannot stress enough how difficult some quizzes can be. You can drop one quiz score. Each in-lab quiz is worth 20 points.

5) Study for the Final Exam. Start studying from the beginning of the quarter. Some experimental questions on the exam are a bitch to do, and you will have had to memorize all facets of the experiments done, plus more.

To do well in 30BL, you must go to Bacher’s office hours. He will straight-up tell you the answers to his online quiz questions if you ask him, so it would be stupid not to attend. You can also ask him for help on the Prelab questions, and he will generally provide helpful hints or even the answer. He likes to make fun of people if they raise up questions he deems stupid, but he’s generally good-natured, so don’t take it personally.

In the lab, the biggest constraint on time is the shared equipment. You can wait anywhere from 3 minutes to 20 minutes just for the people in front of you to finish using the rotary evaporator, so study the lab manual well before so you aren't lagging behind everyone else. You will also spend 5-10 minutes in line waiting for scales if you’re not fast enough. As you can see, slow experimenters are not rewarded in this class. You will get docked half of your evaluation grade (10 points) if you stay even 1 second after the lab ends, so you must budget your time accordingly. Stay 10 minutes after lab ends and you get no points towards your evaluation grade.

One thing I must emphasize is that the TA has absolute reign over half of your grade. Some TAs will barely even look over your Prelabs and Postlabs, while some will grade it with the utmost scrutiny and give you a shitty grade, even if you think you did well. Some will also give you very tough quizzes. If you have a difficult TA, you’re not going to have a fun time. While the grades from the Prelabs, Postlabs, and in-lab quizzes are curved, don’t slack off. There’s always some asshole who fucks the curve over.

Personal pointers:

1) Use acetone instead of water to wash your equipment, since it dries quickly. The only exception is when there are inorganic compounds that can’t be washed off with acetone, in which case you wash it first with water, then with acetone.

2) Have a separate beaker in which you put all your waste liquids and solids, since you aren’t allowed to dump any of it in the sink (this isn’t 30AL and you will get marked off).

3) Know which beakers and flasks you’ll need in the lab and how soon you’ll need it. Time management is key.

4) Take a little more of the pure product that the TA provides than you’ll need and (surreptitiously) store it in your lab drawer. Since you’ll need to use the products you’ve made as reactants in the next lab, your purity will obviously go down, which will lower your Postlab grade. Some experiments use the same reactant as previous labs. You can see where I’m going with this.

5) The in-lab quiz is worth 20 points. The Prelab and Postlab are only worth 10 points. Get your priorities straight, so don’t spend hours upon end on the Prelabs and Postlabs if you haven’t studied for the quiz yet.

6) Get a friend in this class that actually tries hard. Not even kidding on this one. You will save loads of time on the online quizzes, Prelabs, and Postlabs.

If this review hasn't scared you off, good luck. Bacher's a pretty cool guy to talk to, but unfortunately his coolness doesn't extend to the pile of work he’ll have you do.

If you took 30BL with Bacher, did very well on the labs and are willing to sell your labs, tests, worksheets and other material please email me at *************

Bacher is fricken genius when it comes to Chem labs. Just by looking at your set-up he can assure you that the reaction will or won't work and it's quite scary since the time for each experiment is so limited! I screwed up so many labs and it really made life quite stressful but if you try hard and put in the effort and time, then it is possible to do well. I personally spent a good 8 hours a week writing up the lab reports if not longer. Also GO TO OFFICE HOURS and ask many questions because he gives you a lot of answers including the answers to his online quizzes! The class is curved which kind of sucks so every assignment matters no matter how little pints it's worth. His final is actually not too bad because there is only so much you can quiz on the same subject. Do every single practice problem and final he has to ensure a good grade!

If anyone needs the course reader bundle for the Spring '11 quarter, please email me at *************.

Only $50.

I actually really liked this class. Bacher may seem intimidating and he does have a thick accent, but I never had a very hard time understanding him. There are several keys to doing well in his class.
1. Attend lectures- he has a lot of helpful tips and usually all of the pre-lab questions can be answered if you listen during lecture.
2. Do your own work- I did all of my own lab reports and didn't have any old ones. The lab reports really are not difficult once you understand how your TA grades them. You should put time into them, but as my TA reminded me, they're only worth 5 points! So don't stress if you do bad on a few of them.
3. Study for the in class quizzes! These are a HUGE chunk of your grade because there's one every week. I always felt like my scores were so low (average 15/20 or so) but most people in my class had low averages too.
4. Do all of the problems in his exam booklet, and read through all of the procedures in the course reader. The point of his exam is to assess how well you understand the theory behind the chemistry you did all quarter. If you did your own work, you shouldn't have a hard time. The final exam was challenging but definitely doable, especially because some of the questions were verbatim from the exam reader!

All in all: a challenging course but it's worth it when you look back and realized how much you learned.