I was SO afraid to take LS2 with Fain/Cooper due to the horrible reviews on here... but they were so wrong! Fain is definitely one of my favorite professors at UCLA so far. He is extremely warm, friendly, and intelligent. His slides are straightforward and he makes his lectures extremely interesting (he loves telling stories about himself... who can blame him when he has so many interesting life experiences?). He's just so warm and you can tell he is a professor who truly just wants to see students learn and enjoy the material. He gave so many hints on what the free response questions of his portion of the exam would be on and it was pretty much impossible to not know what the questions would be on once the exam actually came around.

I really do not understand why this professor has so many bad reviews. And trust me, it's not just me that felt this way. Several other of my friends in the class had no idea why Fain had such a bad rep and we all really enjoyed him.

I took LS 2 with Cooper and Fain in Fall 2012. Fain is a good professor; he thoroughly explains concepts though the powerpoints are fairly heavy on pictures (i.e. lots of images, not so many explaining captions). This can make it difficult to go back and study if you're not sure what information you're supposed to be gaining from a specific picture-only slide.

One word of advice: on the multiple choice only final, all questions have an E. none of the above option. This means you really, really, really have to know the material and be sure of your answers.

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Course: LS 2 with Fain and Cooper

I took this course during fall11. I preferred Cooper to Fain. Cooper's lectures covered a lot less material (most of which many of us learned during AP bio) and his MC test questions were straight forward. His short answers were mostly straightforward the the except two or so that requires you to have paid really good attention to what he says during lecture because it will not be covered on the lecture slides. Fain on the other hand, it opposite. His material covered a lot....A LOT. It's a lot of memorizing but not impossible. I did get frustrated every time I thought about how material I had to memorize, but I still did it. His MC questions are very tricky. He always has an E. none of the above/ all of the above. His wording is also very vague. Even the ta's couldn't find out what he was trying to ask on a couple of questions. His short answers are fairly easy and predictable. Unfortunately, the final consisted of 100 MC questions and 80 of them were his.
I also felt like Cooper was a nicer guy. Fain told the class that if they worked hard and didn't get an A, they should rethink premed....very unnecessary.

overall: take cooper, but try to avoid fain. he's not ridiculously hard but you do have to work a lot harder for a good grade in his class than in other LS2 classes.

Course Taken: Life Sciences 2

I took LS 2 with Dr. Fain/Dr. Cooper. I thought Dr. Fain was absolutely amazing--he knew the material well and seemed really enthusiastic teaching the material. In terms of the material, I thought Fain's half of the class was much more interesting (how the organs worked), but it was also much more difficult than Cooper's material. There was definitely a lot more to know. Fain's free response questions were straight forward and not too difficult, but his multiple choice questions were really tricky/hard. Every question literally had an "e) none of the above", so you really have to know your stuff. Everything you need to know is on the lecture slides, so don't bother reading stuff in the textbook that Fain never talks about. Fain talks really fast in lecture because he kinda assumes that you learned most of the stuff "in high school", so if you don't catch everything he says (which is likely), go to office hours and/or read the textbook (it's a great supplement to his lectures). He really encourages you to go to office hours and he's more than willing to explain the material again to you. He also has little stories that get him sidetracked during lecture, but they're usually funny and keep the lectures interesting. If not, it's not that hard to just ignore them. Overall, I really didn't like the amount of memorization required in this class (I'm more of an "applying concepts" person rather than pure memorization), but I did find myself learning a lot. I highly recommend Dr. Fain for LS 2: He's a nice guy and really great!