I had Prof. Pham for all three ochem courses (30A, 30B, 30C) and he is honestly the best Professor to have. Ochem seems very daunting, but Pham really broke it down clearly and in a way that's easy to digest. He was very understanding of his students and showed clear effort to ensure that his students were doing well during quarantine and the sudden shift to an online quarter.

With the online quarter for Spring 2020, we had 2 midterms (24 hours, gradescope), a final (ended up being optional no-harm), as well as problem set worksheets (newly implemented due to online learning, he didn't have these in 30A or 30B) that were graded on accuracy (they weren't too bad).

Overall, highly recommend him as a professor!

Pham is the homie. People give him flack for being really sarcastic or satirical but he's real with his students and I find that endearing. He kinda got famous (or rather infamous) for his notorious email regarding 30B winter finals but he did apologize wholeheartedly. He cares for his students and he's pretty funny too. Trust. Overall a good guy. Regarding the transition to online learning, he was super understanding and flexible. No complaints.
As for the class, o-chem is o-chem. It's mad hard but possible to do well in. His slides are gold. His tests are kinda unorthodox compared to Chen (and Merlic from what I've heard) but they're fair. Huge time crunches but fair as far as content goes. Practice problems are mad helpful. Good luck dawg.

Professor Pham is very caring. I've taken Ochem with other professors and I think that Il earned the material best from him compared to other professors. His slides are very clear and easy to follow. He was very understanding with the transition to online. He made BACON worth a lot (even though it's almost guaranteed A) and he added the problem sets which were good practice. I only took the midterm and it was pretty reasonable and easy. Due to the protests, he made the final optional. Overall, he's been very understanding this quarter and I really learned a lot from him. I'm glad that I got a chance to take 30C with him! I would recommend, even in an in-person format.

I took this class the first time Pham taught it online, during the pandemic. I've previously taken Chem 14C with the dude (I switched from life sci to biochem), and knew that I would like him.
For context, I tried out taking Chem 30C with Merlic for the first 2 weeks of Winter (before the impacted course drop deadline) and REALLY did not like Merlic's teaching style. I personally know that I do fine with slides and appreciate the greater organization over seeing everything drawn out. Merlic was a lot more messy and harder to follow, and spoke so goddamn fast that lecture was just excruciating. I just couldn't retain anything from his lectures because of it, which made me super anxious. But Pham is highly understandable, able to point out key concepts and good at simplifying things. For huge ochem buffs, you may prefer Merlic since Pham may have a tendency to over-simplify (but not in a way that would hurt you on an exam b/c his exams reflect what he teaches you), but I definitely didn't mind.
Because of the nature of this quarter, we only had one midterm and one final. Everything was open-book, open-note. We were given 24 hours to submit, but were encouraged to follow guidelines for taking it within 2 hours for the midterm and 3 hours for the final. However, this was only an honor-based system and he only started pushing this more heavily when he felt like students were taking advantage of the system...and ended up going back to saying 24 hours was okay at the end of the quarter when things were getting crazy with the protests.
The class was originally supposed to be 50 points BACON, 100 points midterm, 100 points problem set, and 150 points final, but Pham was extremely accommodating following the protests. He made the class instead out of 250 points, and the final optional. Essentially, he adjusted the final to be 100 points and would just take the better exam between the midterm or final. If you did take the final, it was made no-harm as well. The problem sets and BACON were the same number of points. Problem sets weren't bad at all. Only select problems were graded. He added them so we wold have more buffer points during this online quarter.
We had a total of 3 main opportunities for extra credit. CryOFF project for 8 points + 2 more points if you were chosen as best project, 2 points for evals, and 1 point for pre-midterm survey. Following the protests, he gave everyone minimum 6 points on CryOFF though. On the midterm, there was one random EC point (not skill). On the final, there was 4 EC points, with 3 points coming from some ochem relevant knowledge (knowing UCLA professors) and 1 free EC point.
But yeah, Pham was great, although it was sad to see him less enthusiastic/more down this quarter. He's a good teacher, although I finally understand why some people say he's not as patient with questions. He switches between being usually pretty nice during lecture, to being potentially blunt/intimidating for individual questions during OH or at the end of class. But I know he means well and just tried not to take it personally. I still really appreciated him b/c ochem could be somewhat confusing/convoluted to me with other profs, but I had no trouble whatsoever with Pham, even though it's been 2 years since I took ochem. He was more than fair - promising us that he would not make the exams any longer or harder than he normally would even with all his accommodations. And I can verify that this is true. Never in a million years did I expect ochem to go this smoothly, and yes there were a lot of accommodations, but I still feel like I learned a lot :).