Honestly this class and Professor Shao were both pretty great. The class moves fast and you probably won't understand everything in lecture but if you try your best and ask questions you'll do fine. The tests are mostly like homework and Prof Shao/the TAs are very helpful and great at explaining the content.

Shao is honestly a great professor. She is flexible especially with grades, considering that half of your points are from the worksheets that we do in discussions and the Cengage assignments (where you have 10 attempts per question, so you can easily get 100s on them). The content is pretty difficult though and sometimes it is hard to take it all in since the lectures are all 50 minutes long. However, she records all of the lectures and she gives out structured notes that she uses the lectures. Also, she made the TAs have review sessions that were super helpful. I would recommend definitely looking over the notes a couple of times since the class can be pretty fast-paced and just reviewing the notes is nice on taking in the information. The grading scale is also pretty nice since if you get 85+, you'll get an A. The midterms can be a bit brutal though with the average scores being around 50-70. All in all, Shao is a pretty good professor who is pretty generous with a class with difficult content.

Professor Shao is everything you could ask for in a college professor. Yes, this class is really hard because of the difficulty of the subjects and how many are gone over, but she is amazing at teaching. She hosts zoom meetings for students who happen to not be able to go to class in person for whatever reason and posts all recordings on Canvas. She has 6 hours worth of office hours per week to help anyone and makes sure she goes around helping everyone that has questions. Every week, there's a worksheet that you do in discussion and it gives a really good overview of what concepts you should know and how to answer those questions quantitatively. The format of the questions in the worksheets are the same format for questions asked on the midterms and final which meant nothing would be coming as a trick question or anything like that. The midterms/final are open note so you can bring whatever you like--however the midterms are really rough in terms of the amount of time that you had so best to give yourself tips on how to solve a problem instead of content written down. The midterms prepared us very well for the final because since we were so crunched on time before, it gave us a lot of breathing room on the final to check your answers several times. Overall, Professor Shao is an amazing professor, providing several resources for studying and always striving to help students as well as accommodation in the forms of pushing back homework assignments and literally changing the midterms/final to open note for us. 10/10 definitely recommend

Honestly one of the nicest and most genuine professors at ucla. Professor Shao is extremely caring of her students and listens to the feedback of student. However, the class is rigorous and you will need to put in the work in order to do well in the class.

I didn't feel that the class curriculum was organised well and if it fulfills your major reqs, I hear that the chem 14 series is better. You are expected to know most of the standard concepts like stoichiometry and other basic chem stuff.
Overall, a lot of the quantum mechanics part is somewhat confusing but you don't need to fully understand the concepts if you're just in it for the grade. Practicing the cengae problems, the problems she gives in class, and reveiwing her notes will get you a decent grade, whatever your standards are.
For Shao herself, she was a good professor who responded well to questions and had organised notes. I liked her lectures, although a little dry at times. The class overall had a very confusing structure as it went through concepts in what I felt was a pretty random order. I'm honestly not sure what she could've done about the class on that point. The notes were really helpful for understanding what to know for finals and midterms.

Finals and midterms were fair if you studied a decent amount. I felt that the grading was honestly pretty lenient in retrospect. Grade percentages are relatively lenient and she has 3% extra credit.

Conclusively, if you have to take the chem 20 series or you're interested quantum mech, she's a great professor. But if you have the option of chem 14 instead, I hear it's a better class.

Professor Shao is a very kind professor. Although the beginning of this course may be hard, as long as you push through and pay attention to her lecture, it's really not that difficult. Also, the worksheets in the discussion session are very helpful as well, I usually go over them before any exam. The first midterm was tough, but if you are having a hard time in this class you should definitely go talk to Professor Shao in person and she gave out very good suggestions. Go to her office hours and people who go usually help each other a lot as well. This class taught me that college chemistry is definitely different than high school AP chemistry. It is challenging, but as long as you push through and don't give up, things will eventually be paid off. P.S. Prof Shao loves using the smiley face so be on a look out for :)

This was Professor Shao's first quarter teaching and she did pretty well. The textbook that she had us buy was not very useful as it included too much information rather it's more useful for you to get more familiar with her notes and watch a video to familiarize yourself with the content rather than read the textbook. the cengage assignments did not reflect what was being taught in the course most of the time, except the stoichiometry ones, but that was because stoichiometry has a universal practice/question format. The midterms and final were based off of the worksheets which had one to two questions and the issue with the class was the lack of practice problems. Overall the TAs and support system were great. She offered lots of review session for the midterm, she tried to have office hours and the TAs did as well. It was a great environment and I would take the class again.

If you're entering 20A with little in-depth chemistry knowledge (as I did), I would highly (highly!) recommend Professor Shao. She provides so many resources (well-organized notes, practice problems, exam study guides, review lectures) and is sincerely dedicated to helping students succeed. The online homework is relatively light and the discussion session worksheets act as a helpful (and often necessary) review. Exams are more difficult in terms of content, but doable if you review the discussion worksheets and practice problems. She doesn't curve them, but the letter grade itself is buffered a bit and there are plenty of extra credit opportunities. Overall, I would definitely take this class again and recommend to other students.

This professor is the best professor you should take for chem 20A. I passed AP chem at a (competitive) nor cal high school with an A-, and in this class the excessive EASY homework and 30 points EXTRA CREDIT helped me get an A+ in chemistry, for putting in a day to 2 days before studying for exams. I completely recommend this professor for those who are not the best or suck at chem or even are great at chem. The material is rich and extensive, across all the chem classes, but atleast you will not have to worry about your grade in this class. She also grades very generously on tests, giving partial credit and even takes regrade requests if you want higher points where deserved. She is super nice, and very responsive when need be.

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.