I got a 65% on first midterm, 68% of second midterm, and 88% on final. Ended with a B+ and honestly I'm not mad. This class was so hard, definitely the hardest class I've ever had to take at this school. Never had studied harder for an exam I'm still kind of dead inside :) this class is def easier in person (she gave us in person exams and I was able to do them with no problem) but b/c it was online, she made the exams so hard

Professor Reilly was for sure one of my more favorite Professors in the Chem series.

She is engaging, clear, an excellent lecturer, very helpful, etc. However, one thing in her class (this was also in Chem 14D and 153A) was that the exams were a bit more difficult than our lecture material. Even our supplemental materials (worksheets) were a bit easier, so in order to do well on the exams, you would have to go the extra mile to get more practice problems from Google or something that was harder.

This issue of exams being harder than lectures and our worksheets is something that seems to be a staple to the chem department. Work hard, go to office hours, try to look up difficult problems online that you can practice from, and you should be good to go.

The material was super interesting to learn (people say you either like 14C or 14D), but the exams would always give us anxiety.

She prepares you really well for 14D and beyond, so TAKE THIS CLASS WITH PROFESSOR REILLY!

Professor Reilly is the best professor I've had during my time at UCLA. If you have the opportunity to take this class with her, I would 100% recommend it. I would take her class again in a heartbeat. She really cares about her students and has been very accommodating during the pandemic. She holds office hours after class and during the weekend. We had 3 different types of assessment -- 5 Take-Home Assessments, 5 In-Class Assessments, 6 BACON. Take-Home Assessments were completion and she held workshops after they were due to go over each problem. In-Class Assessments were completed in 1 hour during class time. These were pretty challenging, but as I adapted to her testing/teaching method, it became easier over time. BACON worked to integrate our course materials with real-life, and although these were not for completion, they were very easy and took only 20 minutes. She also shows us pictures of her dog Kasey, who is absolutely adorable, during lecture. She gave numerous extra credit assignments including completing evaluations and memes/drawing.

hey, pre-meds. I know you are all mad because you're probably gonna end up with something not an A, but seriously calm down. I truly think Reilly is a great, engaging, and funny professor; and her only flaw really is just being disorganized and the answer keys (but seriously a great lecturer). I mean, just look at her reviews for the 30 series and look at the 14 series. see the difference? it's because the 14 series is full of entitled pre-meds who can't stand getting anything below a 4.0 (I am a pre-med too btw). I don't think I'm gonna get an A, but I've already accepted that. Yes, exams are tough and the material is draining, but that's ochem. ask any chem/biochem major. calm down, y'all are just taking your anger out on Reilly. downvote me all you want. i've made my point.

This woman was not the worst lecturer. However, her exams were extremely difficult and did not match the practice material difficulty. It almost felt like she was trying to come up with the most difficult and confusing questions. Also, on the first midterm almost everyone got a question wrong and instead of self reflecting on her own teaching she blamed us and did nothing. She never curved anything tried to fix her mistake by making the next midterm easier to bring up the class average; however, no one recieved any retribution for the collective unpreparedness for it. Also, the final was brutal and she again just said "sorry!". Don't take her unless you want to take challenging exams and see pics of a dog that looks like its a corpse.

This class is by no means easy, and I definitely struggled despite putting in a lot of effort, but I still enjoyed the course, and I absolutely adore this woman and HER DOG KACEY, who plays a huge role in this class :)

Course Breakdown:
Problem Sets: 100 points
Discussion Participation: 50 points
BACON quizzes: 50 points
Midterm 1: 100 points
Midterm 2: 100 Points
Final Exam: 100 points
Total: 500 Points

Lectures: Reilly's lectures are super clear and detailed - she does go pretty fast but you'll get used to it **note: about halfway through the quarter she switched the Zoom chat settings so that you can only message her and the TAs, so if someone asks a question in the chat and she answers it, you don't know what the question is - it can be a bit frustrating sometimes but if you ask her to clarify she will! She also uploads all of her lecture notes both pre- and post-annotation, as well as lecture recordings for each lecture time/section

Discussion: discussion attendance is part of the participation grade, you work in the same breakout room groups all quarter and there's a discussion worksheet every week - you work at your own pace and you usually don't have to submit them for grading, but sometimes she'll have you submit one of the discussion worksheets as a problem set -- TAs and LAs were super helpful during discussion

Workload: not really difficult or time consuming -- 5 problem sets & a few online quizzes on a platform called BACON -- most of the time she released the answer keys for the problem sets before the due date and graded them on completion, but it wasn't stated as such on the syllabus so it's definitely subject to change

Communication: She's very clear about expectations, due dates, etc, and sends out a bunch of email announcements, so the course structure is very clear -- as someone else mentioned, she's pretty hard to get in touch with over email, but she's VERY active on campuswire, so if you have a general content or logistical question, she'll answer it within a few hours (sometimes minutes), and if it's something more personal/specific, direct messaging her on campuswire should yield a response!

Resources: She gives a lot of practice problems and resources from other websites and platforms for you to get some practice in with the topics, and posts optional homework problems from the textbook; for the first midterm she also made a practice exam -- she makes video answer keys for almost every discussion worksheet/exam/problem set, which is SUPER helpful because she walks through the reasoning for the answer rather than just writing the answer on a pdf

Exams: These were the real grade killers unfortunately - I always started studying about a week in advance for each midterm and the final, I did every single practice problem, re-did every single worksheet, re-watched every single lecture, and went into the exam feeling really confident about the course material, and I still scored below average on the first midterm and only a few points above average on the second midterm and final -- the general consensus seemed to be that the exam questions were often harder than the practice problems we had worked on, and unfortunately there's no really getting around that, so I would recommend doing ALL of the practice problems and then some -- it takes a lot of effort to score well on these -- HOWEVER she makes both midterms and the final all worth the same amount of points, so they all carry the same weight

Extra Credit: Reilly does offer a few points of extra credit for things like course evaluations, LA feedback, and a few surveys, and at the end of the quarter she offers extra credit for drawing her dog Kacey, which is a nice change of pace from the misery of week 10 and finals

TLDR: Overall, Reilly is a really great professor and teaches really well, she's really engaging and understanding, and just a really nice person overall, she gives a lot of resources, example problems for practice, and a few extra credit opportunities, but her exams are unfortunately still really difficult -- ochem is a tough class, but it's not impossible, and even though I didn't do as well as I wished I had grade-wise, I do feel like I came out of the class with a decent understanding of the concepts and it was worth it

Dr. Reilly was incredibly kind and offered a bunch of extra credit as well as a completion for all our problem sets rather than being graded for correctness. She made everything open book and compiled all the reactions but somehow still managed to make the tests hard which is honestly probably good for learning because you still had to spend time studying rather than just using everything she gave you. I did most of the practice problems in the book and flashcards and that helped me a ton! However, I'm not sure if this applies to her other classes, but since it was summer, the information was PACKED. Like, I used to watch my math lectures at 2x speed but here I barely managed 1.5 and had to stop a lot because the information was so incredibly dense and with little breaks, making the 2 hour lectures straight a bit rough. Overall, awesome class and good prof, but definitely still hard, good luck!

This was a great class and I feel like I really learned a lot even though we only took it in six weeks. the information was very organized and professor Reilly gives her students a lot of resources to help them succeed. I feel like I learned everything I needed to know and even though ochem is not one of my best subjects Professor Reilly made it possible to succeed in her class. My recommendation to anyone taking the class is to at least do all the worksheets and write the reaction sheets yourself, and be really meticulous on exams. It was also really fun and she likes jokes and stuff which made the lectures enjoyable to go to and we got to make our own problems and memes which made me really happy. 100% recommend Reilly.

Professor Reilly is amazing. She is very clear and articulate in her office hours about what she is looking for in her pre-lab and post-lab assignments, and she's really engaging with topics that expand out of CHEM 30CL to relate concepts to outside applications i.e. industry, pharmaceuticals, etc. Additionally, Professor Reilly is very empathetic, accommodating, and a pretty chill professor to strike a conversation with. Although I was unable to take this class in a practical laboratory setting due to pandemic reasons, this course was very enriching with cooler and more exciting organic chemistry concepts and lab knowledge compared to CHEM 30BL (...no offense). In all, there are some things that are less appealing in virtual CHEM 30CL such as troubleshooting issues that come from TopSpin (yea... still as annoying as in CHEM 30BL) and virtual lab sections, which is slightly less exciting and engaging compared to practical lab sections. However, if you ever have the chance to take CHEM 30CL with Professor Reilly, please do!

Side note: If you want to see a ton of dog pics especially greyhounds to motivate your spirits, this is probably the course for you!

Dr. Reilly is the best professor I have had at UCLA so far. She is very receptive of students facing difficulties and genuinely goes the extra mile to ensure their success. I greatly appreciated the formatting of assessments: 5 one-hour exams, each held on the Monday of every even week. It substituted the stresses of high volumes of content on one or two midterms with consistent, relatively lower-weighted checkpoints of learning with somewhat difficult problems on a slimmer volume of content. This format allows students to more clearly monitor their progress, however amidst other classes also with frequent assessments, I can certainly see how this could be a drawback. The final exam was notoriously difficult, perhaps twice as hard as any previous assessment (we had a 50% average), in my opinion, so make sure you are very well prepared. However, and I can't stress this enough: try to not worry about your grade too much. Your worst assessment score will be dropped and there are three extra-credit opportunities. On top of this, the completion-based assignments were very helpful and comprised a good ~40% of the grade. As for lectures, I found her pace to be pretty fast to get through a lot of content (since five lecture slots are devoted to the aforementioned assessments), so recordings are your best friend. Also, reading the free textbook PDF is very useful for additional practice problems and reinforcing concepts. If there is one thing to take away from this post: if you can, GO TO OFFICE HOURS. Dr. Reilly is incredibly responsive to any questions you may have and does not finish answering until she ensures that you understand. I learned several useful clarifications and approaches to problems for tests. There are so many office hours during the week along with weekend sessions before each test and workshops for each take-home completion-based problem set. Overall, if you see Dr. Reilly's name for any Chemistry class you are considering, I highly recommend you take her.