Professor Finck taught 20B for the first time Winter 2017. I came from 20A with Scerri, and I thought that chemistry at UCLA would be hard, boring, and a waste of time. Finck made me want to go to class, because his lectures were engaging, and he gave us real life examples of chemistry to tie to the concepts. Finck really cares about student learning (He has DAILY office hours, he will answer your questions through email extremely quickly, and he will set up private appointments if you are struggling.)

His class is uncurved, and both the midterm and final exam is worth 20% of your grade. The rest is composed of various homework assignments (They're actually not bad at all), weekly quizzes in discussion, and the dreaded OWLv2. It's not really important to know OWL for the midterms, so just bs your way through that. (1% extra credit for completing the end of the year survey)

On top of that, he is an extremely sweet professor. He won't ever mock you for not understanding something (Cough, Scerri, cough, Felker) and he doesn't lose patience when he has to explain things multiple times. One thing I noticed at the end of the year was that he was crying and he seemed depressed. I suspect it was because there was one TA who didn't do his job at all, and it unfairly impacted a group of students.

Incoming freshman! Take his class! Form study groups! There is no limit to how many A's can be given out, and forming study groups can really help. (Coming form a sophomore)

Like the review above, I had Finck for Chem 20B, so all of this applies for his 20B class. I had Scerri as well, and both professors were good in their own right. With Finck, I really enjoyed that he cared about student learning, and would always seek out feedback on how we could improve. However, this desire to improve really bogged down the pace answering questions, and the lectures ended up being quite disorganized and slow. However, he really got into a groove at the end of the quarter when he started using slides and writing on the board at the same time.

His class was uncurved, 20% each for two midterms and then the final 25%. The other 35% was split amongst a bunch of busy work and quizzes in discussion. I do have to say that the busy work was a bit excessive at times and quite worthless. We also got around 1% extra credit. As for the first midterm, it was extremely difficult, with averages in the 60s or something. It was so bad that he ended up curving the exam around 10 percent or so even though he didn’t want to do any curving. As for the second midterm, the average was around a 75%. The final wasn’t that hard either. He also had bonus points on the first two midterms that could have potentially factored into how your grade ended up.

Finck is a really nice guy and really seems to care, so I felt pretty bad for him at the end of the quarter due to one really really bad TA who wouldn’t show up to office hours, who wouldn’t grade his portions of exams, etc. The TA was really awful, and when I went to pick up my midterm from him around finals week, Finck looked absolutely done with teaching, depressed, and defeated. I felt really bad for him because he was a nice guy.

Overall, he was an okay professor. In the end, he was decent, and I can’t really complain that much about him. He was nice, and he gave me some pretty good advice. After I did really poorly on the first midterm, he met with me 1 on 1 to talk with me about study habits, and the strategies ended up being really helpful, and I utilized the methods and strategies that he recommended to clutch an A in the end. For that, I am glad that I took him.

Finck was great for Chem 20B!!! Extremely caring and friendly as well as engaging lectures. Tests were fair and homework used OWL.

I took Finck for Chem 20B in Winter 2017. He was a wonderful person, and brand new at the time. He really cared about students' learning and really loved the subject. I'm not even a chemistry person. Chemistry is my worst subject.
Finck's lectures were engaging and he was funny. He didn't curve the class but he did scale the test when the average was low, and I think in the end, the average was around a B/B-.
The exams are pretty reasonable, and the average for midterm 1 were in the mid-70 range. Midterm 2 was lower, I think it was a 65 or something like that. His exams were both conceptual and computational, so you needed to understand the math in addition to doing the computations.
Finck was very approachable and responsive. He responded to emails almost immediately, and he really tried to work with students as much as he could. He was very knowledgeable and had to hold office hours in a larger room because so many people showed up. He had office hours every day too, I think.
He gave quizzes in discussion sections, which forced us to stay on top of our studying. Quizzes were only every couple of weeks or so, and they weren't too bad. Most of them were good little grade-boosters.
Homework was through OWL and it was fairly reasonable.
Overall, I'd highly recommend Finck as a professor and I'd take a class with him again if I ever had to take chemistry.

The class was a much lighter workload compared to my other classes. Finck is an engaging lecturer, although he can occasionally get diverted on tangents. You can tell that he cares about teaching, and that's really refreshing to see in a professor.

He's a great guy and really cares about teaching. His class isn't very hard, as long as you review the material every week. He's super generous about grading and feels terrible if they graded your tests incorrectly. I came in with my final and showed him a question and he gave me partial credit and it raised my grade to an A-.

Super thoughtful and kind professor. Really cares about students and teaching and will always reply to your emails and questions. Tests can be difficult however.

Professor Finck is absolutely incredible. He makes sure we understand every concept, takes feedback for every class, answers each doubt, and is also very engaging and funny. His tests are mostly based on the lines of his lectures and his homework. Overall, TAKE HIS CLASS!

I think Finck is a great teacher. He was a little sketchy about what would be on the tests ("anything and everything we have covered in the lectures or homework" is a direct quote I believe). He was very disorganized with getting a workable set of texts for us to read from and backtracked on some of the information he gave to read us as he realized it was confusing and outdated (but I am not sure why he didn't realize this before he assigned it). The midterm was easy and the final was not.