strong care for the well-being of students, strongly recommended!

I took this as an EE major and it wasn't bad. There's a lot of people in the class so your TA sometimes can't respond to your emails fast. There were two midterms and they were weighted 15% each so it wasn't bad plus it was online with 90 min time limit on gradescope. The biggest chunk of your grade comes from the discussion worksheets and if you go to the discussions, it's a free 30% of your grade. Honestly the biggest reason why I didn't get an A in this class was I overslept my discussion as it was at 8am, but if you go to those, you're good. Lectures are recorded and uploaded on bruinlearn or youtube. She has annotated notes uploaded. Honestly, Shao said the class was kind of difficult but it was fairly manageable. Even though she says homework takes an average of 8 hours to do, it only took me 2 hours on average. It gives you 10 tries to do a question and you never need more than 3 tries. She starts off with quantum mechanics, but since there is no calculus involved in this class, it was pretty easy. Try to take Chem 20A with Shao if you can.

Heard bad things before taking this class but ended up really liking it. You do NOT need to read the textbook, you will do well as long as you just pay attention in lectures and put effort into the discussion worksheets. If you can keep up with the content, you don't need to put much study time in for exams. Plus, only half your grade is exams, and the other half is easy to earn homework/ discussion points. She also offers 3% extra credit just for filling out surveys/ submitting exams correctly.