First off, Pang's lectures are incredibly boring. Especially at 8 in the morning. His handouts are helpful to an extent. His studyguides aren't helpful at all. He purposefully tries to throw you off and makes the study guides as far from reality as possible. His tests are all conceptual. I had the first midterm for the quarter before mine and it was completely different from what I dealt with even though both are conceptual. Study the labs and all definitions. Here's my main complaint against Pang:

He is a horrible person. He doesn't care about his students. I had to miss a lab and I informed him a month in advance. He took forever to get back to me and would not be accommodating at all. Long story short, the TAs helped me out but Pang...Pang is just awful. I suggest to just not take him. Be safe, take someone else even if it means at a later quarter. I promise you, it's not worth it to suffer through his class.

Don't make stupid mistakes because they will screw you over. I forgot to write in my MSDS for the first lab report & didn't check my pre-lab, and I got 10/30 on the lab. That hurt me. And I didn't take the CPRs seriously. Please do. Pang was a great teacher, but you have to read and search for all of the extra material online to fully understand all of the concepts. Just make sure you pay attention to what you're doing and you're sure to get a good grade.

Pang's class basically separates the men from the boys at UCLA. There are those who got into UCLA by mass studying...these kids have no real intelligence. And then there are the legitimately intelligent people who understand the concepts behind everything they learn.

If you are an idiot, you will do terrible in this class. If you are even reasonably smart, it will be the easiest class ever. Hardly anything to study. Pang tells you exactly what he wants on labs. CPRs are free points if you just answer the questions.

There is hardly any material for this course...it only goes over Beer's Law, titrations, rates, and crystallization basically. Nothing more. I don't see whats so hard about understanding titrations...it's pathetic.

Seeing people complain about this course makes me regret not getting into a higher ranked school. It's ridiculous.

Hard to avoid him as a 14BL teacher, which sucks. He's horrible in every way. Just cross your fingers and suck it up for 10 weeks, that's really the only thing you can do.

I haven't gotten my final grade yet, but - Pang is ridiculous, and there's no easy way to not take a lab course with him.

The exams were heavily conceptual, and the study guides for them are all calculations. Furthermore, the concepts that are covered in lecture are not detailed enough in the lecture notes. You have to listen to him incredibly carefully in order to get all the details about eutectic substances, how to calculate pH (his way, of course), etc. Thankfully, his accent isn't as bad as some other professors'.

Now, while it's only 8% of your grade, CPR is incredibly frustrating because it is literally pitting pre-med against pre-med. If you had the potential to screw with someone's grade, even if it's only by a few points, wouldn't you? Probably. On both CPR's, I would have someone grade me really high and someone grade me really low, and I ended up getting B's on both CPR's. Those should be easy A's since they're incredibly straight forward.

But of course, if CPR doesn't bother the hell out of you, wait for the lab reports - Pang's instructions on these are incredibly, incredibly vague. My lab partner and I would attempt to do the reports by ourselves but we got a really low score on the first and then just decided to copy away. Get someone else's old labs. Every point matters in this class, and yes, it's absolutely unfortunate that old labs are pretty much required for this course. Seriously, Pang, if you read this, don't you think that something's wrong if your students can really only pass this course if they have old labs?

The man is just a genuinely mean, arrogant person. He's always been nice to me, but I see him treat other people in just disgusting ways. He is very dismissive of undergrads, and his ego is huuuuuuge. He rarely yells at people; think belittling, passive-aggressive, open condescension. All this goes down in office hours or interactions outside of the lecture hall, during lecture he's basically a dry, stick-to-the-material kind of lecturer. That being said, it's pretty easy to just stay on his good side or avoid him completely by not asking for anything and not expecting attention. He's probably the least available professor I've ever met.

Pang will give you a study guide to prepare you for the exam, then give you an exam that does not relate to the study guide. There is practically no calculations on the test, yet most of the study guide consists of calculations. The curve will destroy you since there is no curve, and regardless if you beat the rest of the class on the midterm, it will not change the fact that you did not get 100%. Your T.A. is extremely important in this class. They can hurt you more than most other T.A's because they grade all your labs and have the power to grade as they please.

This guy sucks. He does not know how to lecture. He is not a good teacher. I am embarrassed to be a UCLA student and call him a professor. He is always being reported to the dean of students and doesn't realize that he is truly an asshole and no one likes him.

Not as hard as everyone says he is. A very good lecturer. Your grades labs are very dependent on who your T.A. is. The tests were fair this quarter but I've seen previous quarters and they were HARD. Overall a caring teacher.

Chem 14BL was not a difficult class at all, but it definitely is time-consuming. To sum some important points up:
1) There are two lab reports due each week: A pre-lab for the experiment you are going to conduct in the lab and a post-lab for the experiment you did last week. The pre-labs are pretty easy. Just remember that you check your sig figs in your calculations and make sure you don't round your numbers until the very end of the calculation. Usually you get points docked off if your sig figs or answers are off by a little. The post labs usually take a bit more time, with the analysis of the data and applying the concepts that Pang teaches you in lecture. The most time-consuming post labs were the Beer's Law one and the Chemical Kinetics one (which were both group labs, by the way). Otherwise, lab reports are really easy points if you put in the effort. Also, don't be scared if your experiment gave the wrong results: As long as you explain your errors well, you will be fine. The lab reports are supposedly graded according to the same rubric that Pang designs, so everyone is graded on the same scale.
2) The class is NOT curved. If you get 90-100%, that's an A; 80-89%, that's a B, etc. Therefore, you don't need to worry about competition and everyone else is more willing to help each other.
3) Pang's lectures are actually very well organized and he basically prints out the lecture guide for you, which resembles his powerpoint presentations. Sometimes, he would do some example problems or throw out extra concepts that are not on his powerpoint, but you should write those down because they might show up on the exams. I thought Pang made the concepts really easy to understand, and he was also a very approachable professor. He is always willing to help: Just e-mail him or go to his office hours.
4) There are online writing assignments called CPR's (or Calibrated Peer Reviews). You basically have to write a short essay responding to the prompt they give you, and afterwards, you have to grade three of your classmates' essays (chosen randomly by the server) and then give your own essay a grade, from a scale of 1-10. I was unlucky because the grades my graders gave me happened to deviate a lot from each other. For example, on the first assignment, I got an 8, 6, and 4, while I gave myself a 7. Therefore, I lost a huge chunk of points because my self-assessment deviated too much from the average, which was a 4.89 (pulled down by the score of 4). However, the CPR's themselves are pretty simple and are only worth 8% of your final grade, so even if you don't do well on them, you don't need to worry. They're only 20 points each.
5) There are two cumulative exams. I guess you can consider the first one as a sort of "midterm" because you take it sometime during 4th or 5th week. It basically covers concepts from calibrations, sig figs, basic stoichiometric calculations, Beer's Law, and titrations & buffers. The second exam, which is the "final", consists of all the concepts stated previously, in addition to recrystallization, melting point theory, and chemical kinetics. You should basically do the study guide that Pang gives you, but do not think that memorizing the study guide will do the trick, because the exam is formatted differently from the study guide. The exam is based on conceptual understandings of the material, even though some are just basically calculations of concentrations or errors. For some questions, Pang gives you graphs (depending on the concept) and asks you to analyze the data. But it is not difficult at all as long as you have a relative understanding of the concepts. I did not think the final exam was difficult at all. At the end, though, there is a section "Reality Check," where Pang gives you a situation and you have to name the concept we learned in class that deals with that situation. So like I said before, you should have a relative understanding of the concepts.
6) The labs are the best part of this class! Maybe because I love doing experiments, so I might be a bit biased, but I really really enjoyed the experimental aspects of this class. It really helped me put the concepts to action and I felt like I learned a lot of valuable things from this course. However, I wish there would be more exciting experiments. Like for the first lab, all we did was calibrate volumetric pipets, which was not too exciting. But oh well, I'm sure Chem 14CL will be awesome.

Basically, Pang is the professor that teaches most of the Chem 14BL and Chem 14CL lectures, so you can't really avoid him. However, he is very nice and very smart, and if you put in a sufficient amount of effort in the lab write-ups and experiments, which helps you understand the concepts well, you will be fine.