Professor Pham and Genetics 107 with him are easily one of my best experiences with stem professors since coming to UCLA. I had him for 7A as an incoming freshman so he was also my first ever college stem professor, and he remains to be funny, helpful, kind, jolly and pleasant. At the start of the quarter, he already made it clear to us that he wants us to succeed and that many people are going to end up with As. You can tell that this man has a real passion for the subject and he tries explaining every concept slowly, clearly and simply, which is not that commonly seen. The content of this class is not hard at all as long as you make an effort to understand them, and I'm speaking as someone who only went to office hour once at the end of the quarter right before the final. The class is very much manageable, I watched all the pre lecture videos in 2x speed(that's basically your homework) and there's a 4 question quiz after that. He uses those pre-lecture videos to introduce concepts to us and he goes over them again in class, and then he goes over a bunch of practice iclicker questions and explain them in detail, which takes up the majority of class time. One thing I love about his class is he always asks if we have questions, and you can always feel free to raise your hand and ask anytime and he'll call on you to answer your question. There are also weekly quizzes but if you truly make an effort to understand the discussion worksheets they're not hard at all. There are two midterms and a final, and he posts a ton of past exams for practice and they closely resemble the actual exams. It's more practice than you could ever go over, and usually I feel good about taking the test after going through just 3 sets of them. His tests are all MCQ and he usually offers 5pts(out of 100)of extra credit for exam revision. This year for the first midterm the average was lower than he wanted it to be so he even bumped the extra credit to 7.5 points. I think that just goes to show how kind of a person he is and he empathizes with his students. One thing about professor Pham is that he has an accent that some might find harder to understand, but personally I understand him just fine, if not better cuz it makes his jokes funnier and the class more engaging. Overall I love him as a professor and his class and I would definitely recommend taking this class.

- midterms are hard so I recommend going to TA office hours, review sessions, do all of the past exams and online practice exams, study the PSS worksheets (he put a PSS question on our first midterm and that tripped a lot of people up), practice all the clicker questions in the slides, and form a study group they will be your lifeline
- He’s very generous though with giving back points for midterms and final via the revision quizzes. We got three revision quizzes throughout the quarter. A 7.5 point revision quiz for midterm 1 (we did particularly bad for that midterm), 5 point revision quiz for midterm 2, and a 10 point revision quiz for the final. They’re not hard, but I recommend at least skimming the exams before you take it.
- utilize the LAs/TAs during discussion they’re very helpful and will teach you tips on how to solve the problems
- the pre-class videos teach you the conceptual stuff and introduce you to how to solve the questions, but lectures are essentially a bunch of clicker questions back to back
- An A is achievable, but you have to put the work in

dr. pham is incredibly kind and truly cares about student learning. he takes the time to answer multiple questions during lecture, really making sure that we understand a topic before moving on. he does a great mixture of content and practice problems in lecture. attendance is mandatory, but some absences are excused and the lectures are very informative and are worth one’s time. dr. pham provides several resources (worksheets, videos, clicker questions) that reflect exam difficulty, and he is very clear on what is included on exams. the course material was very interesting as well! i would highly recommend this course and professor.

The class structure has completely changed. This is the most up to date review you’ll read if you’re planning to take LS107. Obviously everyone knows it was an easy A in the past because it was online. Thus, all of the grade distributions and his rating seem stellar. However, now that it’s flipped, the class is phenomenally harder and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a downtrend in rating with Pham. Fall 2024, he had a policy where with test corrections you’d get half points back of whatever you missed. So say you got a 60/100, that would bump to an 80/100 after corrections. No wonder everyone got an A. However, now this policy has changed. You can only be awarded 5 points out of 100 on the midterm for test corrections via a quiz, and 10 points on the final worth 200 points total. Does it help? Yes, by 2.5% of your total grade after all other assignments are tsken into account. But does it help as much as receiving 1/2 points back on every question like in the past? Heck no. Thus, I wouldn’t be surprised if the grading distribution becomes a lot more scattered outside of the A range in future quarters. My friends and I are typically 4.0 ish students (3.9-4.0), yet were trauma bonded and humbled by how we went into this class thinking easy A and were not at all met with an easy A class. The average j midterm 1 (the easiest of all midterms) was an 87%, followed by midterm 2 73%, followed by the final a 71%. It’s not horrible, but be prepared for this class to be the most workload on your class schedule. I’d compare this class difficulty to Lannan for 153A, except no recycled exams. Eat sleep and breathe genetics. I got a 93% on the final but took endless nights of no sleep and losing myself mentally. So glad to be done..

Pham's so sweet! This class was pretty manageable. Just be careful-- the first midterm is really easy as it's basically LS7B stuff, but the second midterm and final aren't as simple. Lecture attendance is mandatory.