Lavelle goes above and beyond to make every resource possible available to his students and he's proud of it. Some find it annoying when he repeatedly mentions the UA review sessions, Step-up sessions, office hours, etc, etc that are offered, but honestly, it always made me smile. He truly cares about student understanding and it shows. At the beginning of the quarter when students said they liked the music he played before lecture, he decided to DJ for us every class. He dances around and vibes; it's amazing.

Exams are proctored by your TA over Zoom. The exams are 1 hour long. Each question is worth a significant part of your grade so missing just 1 or 2 will cost you a lot of points. I did well on the 1st and 2nd midterm but the final was HARD. Content-wise I understood the final but the timing was off, and I was really pushing it to finish. The class is graded on a straight grading scale with no curving (he did give us an extra 10 points on the final but he said this wasn't common).

How to do well in this class:
- Go to the UA sessions. Personally, these were the most helpful resource for me.
- Do the assigned (but not mandatory) textbook probs because some will show up on the exams
- Listen in lecture (but watch on x1.5 speed because he almost always goes overtime by at least 10 min)

I am selling PDF's of midterm 1 and 2 with solutions for Li's course (14B material) and the PDF of the chemistry textbook (for 14A and 14B). Prices are very very affordable. Please text me at **********. I reply within 5-80 mins.

Selling 7th edition pdf version of textbook for 20$ (1/4 the price)! Regular price at UCLA store for ebook is 80$! Text me @ **********
FYI: Starting 2019-2020 school year, Professor Lavelle is using 7th edition of textbook for homework so better get the book!

Lavelle is a fun man, and he is also quite hip. He is in with the memes, and understands the importance of "exercising your mind and body". For the final lecture before winter break, Lavelle displayed a GIF of a dancing orangutan, and he too got down.
He is not at all self-absorbed or snobby, as some of the past posts have claimed. He is very proud of the many hours of helpful resources available to you, but only because he is happy to see you learning. I feel as if he is doing all he can to help us learn and understand the material (especially in an online setting).
Before taking this class, I'd heard a lot of chemistry horror stories and I am happy to declare that I did not experience this with Professor Lavelle. I recommend taking his class.

One of the questions on his final was "draw cisplatinum" something he never even mentioned in class, then he said it was on his slides but he DOES NOT POST HIS SLIDES. That was probably the most UNFAIR class I've ever taken and i didn't even think the material was hard, he just was awful and unfair. 10/10 DO NOT RECOMMEND AVOID IF YOU CAN OR TAKE SOMEONE ELSE, don't do this to yourself.

Selling 7th edition pdf version of textbook for 20$ (1/4 the price)! Regular price at UCLA store for ebook is 80$! Text me @ **********

Lavelle gives an abundance of resources. There are always TA or UA sessions that you can attend if you feel behind. However, he is a little unclear in the lectures and he often goes off on tangents. 14b is a lot less fun than 14a because it is less conceptual and just a ton of calculations. Overall, Lavelle is a solid teacher to take this class with.

There is no extra credit in this class. He curves the first midterm slightly by giving free points. He also ended up curving up my final grade which was really helpful but to be honest, I really relied on the Workshop because his lectures tend to ramble and he does not get straight to the point. Focus on conceptual aspects of this class to really succeed.

CHEM14B with Dr. Lavelle was a manageable class but requires a good amount of effort. His lectures are not very engaging but he is always good at finishing all the material on time/to schedule. Keep in mind that he goes over more of the concepts in class and then expects his TAs to go over practice problems in discussion (however, if you have a bad TA you might not get the best practice like me lol). I think the best part of his class was all the outside-class resources he organized. I would definitely recommend the Step-up sessions if you need more simple example problems. He was very clear with how he would format his exams (very similar to suggested TB problems + problem sets), but the conceptual MCQ & True/False were a bit trickier. Overall, was not a bad class as long as you put in the work!

Dr. Lavelle is a great lecturer, and you can really tell how passionate he is about chemistry. He always comes to class with a smile on his face, puts on some intro music and does a little jig before class begins, and embraces all topics and questions with a positive attitude. Many people say that Lavelle is slow and boring, but both quarters that I've taken his class we've actually been ahead of schedule. He speaks at an understandable pace in my opinion. If it happens to be too slow for you, the lectures are recorded and posted on BruinLearn so you can set that puppy to 2x speed if you wish. One pet peeve I had about Lavelle's teaching was that he'd spend a lot of lecture time deriving equations using calculus or all kinds of substitutions, but these were never tested nor discussed again, we just got the already-derived versions on an equation sheet. Compared to Chem 14A, the tests in 14B were quite a step up in difficulty. Free response took over the exam format and the weight of those are quite heavy compared to that of multiple choice. The practice problems he recommended from the textbook were extremely useful and the weekly homework was very manageable. Everything on the exams is discussed in class, so there's no trickery there. Overall, I would recommend taking this class with Dr. Lavelle!