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.

not the most engaging lecturer, but he has so many office hours, worksheets, TA office hours, and outside help that an A is definitely achievable if you put in the time to use his resources. His exams were a bit tougher than I expected, but if you do the textbook homework (which is optional) you can recognize some of the questions and how to approach them.

Dr. Lavelle's class is definitely not going to be the easiest A you will get at UCLA. The material covered in CHEM 14B is defiantly much tougher than the material covered in CHEM 14A. Overall, however, Dr. Lavelle does provide with the tools needed for one to succeed in his class. His midterms and final were very fair and contained the problems provided in his syllabus (DO THEM). He also provides UA review sessions which proved to be very helpful. I will say that Dr. Lavelle's lectures themselves are not very useful and tend to be very boring. They oftentimes are spent deriving equations rather than actually doing problems. In past midterms and final he has used these derivations but not on ours. However as he is transitioning back to his pre COVID style, I would expect these lectures to be more useful. The UA sessions were by far the most useful portion of this class. They happen outside of lecture and discussion and help solidify understanding on topics. Shoutout to Gabriel! The reason I got this A was partially because I attended his UA sessions every week. Closer to midterms and finals I would definitely recommend trying to do at least 3 UA sessions to cover all your bases.

In all honesty I am very neutral on Dr. Lavelle. I think his difficulty (or perceived difficulty) is very much to do with the fact that CHEM 14B is a jump from 14A. I would recommend taking Lavelle any day over Scerri. Good luck if you plan on taking this class!!!!

The class isn't too hard as long as you dedicate time to doing a lot of independent practice and studying. Attendance is required for discussion, but not lecture, and lectures are recorded. Discussion sections are helpful for expanding on concepts in lecture and doing practice problems. I really dislike chem but overall the class was manageable (just do the textbook readings and practice problems he recommends!).

This class consists of two midterm exams, one final exam, weekly homeworks, attendance at discussion sections, and participation in the online chemistry forum. The tests are not overly difficult, and the participation based assignments give you a good amount of buffer in your grade.

Lavelle's lectures are very clear, and he never puts anything on exams that was not explicitly covered in class. The exams are often very similar to the textbook problems, so students who do all the weekly problems can succeed easily. Additionally, the UA sessions offer great support to students who need extra help.

This was a great class and I recommend taking it with Lavelle!

Lavelle isn't a great lecturer. He practically whispers and anyone can hardly hear anything he is saying. Additionally, Lavelle spends too much time discussing things that are irrelevant to the objectives we need to master for the tests. His tests were not that hard. He pulls test material from the textbooks but I couldn't do well on them most of the time because he is such a bad lecturer and I had to teach myself everything. I will say that he is a sweetheart and offers many resources to help students but the execution in lectures is just not there and you will find yourself teaching yourself the material.

I don't know if it is just how my brain works or something but this was the worst grade and most struggle I've ever had in any class. I got an A+ in 14A and an A in 14bl so I don't think that it is the chemistry that I am not understanding but for some reason, I can not wrap my head around the tests. He says that they will be just like the textbook but I spent hours in the library doing every single suggested problem in the textbook and went into the exams confident that I could do all of the calculations in the textbook but the midterms had 15 questions total with like 12 being conceptual and 3 being similar format to the textbook, and none of the 12 conceptual questions were really covered anywhere ( I read the textbook in detail too). Other people didn't seem to struggle too hard with this class but for some reason, no matter how much studying I did, I got two C's and an F on the final. He did scale cause I ended up with a B- which everyone says I should be grateful for but I've never struggled so hard just to get a 54 on the final. He does not give you any practice tests or indication of how he will test, and he will not show you what you got wrong. What's the point of a midterm if you can't even study the concepts you didn't understand and improve on them for the later exams? Isn't that the whole point of teaching something? To allow students to learn?? I am so salty.

TAKE 14BL SIMULTANEOUSLY IF POSSIBLE
If you need to take the Lab take them at the same time. I wish I had. I just forgot everything I learned in B for BL, but it would've been helpful to just two-for-one study, The material is the same.

I really loved how enthusiastic Lavelle was about chemistry. He provides so many resources such as TA office hours and UA workshops/step-up sessions to help his students. There's also chemistry community which is so nice as any question you have will be answered very quickly. I took this class the previous quarter with Scerri but dropped it as his teaching did not aid me at all. I found Lavelle's class to be much more manageable and clear. There are two midterms which are 15 questions multiple choice. There is no partial credit given which is annoying. The final was 25 mc questions. I believe you can only miss 8 questions in total on the exams if you want an A in the class (before the curve, and assuming everything else is 100%). The midterms were very conceptual. He tells you to do all the assigned textbook problems, but a good amount of the exam was conceptual and not math focused. Before the test, everyone gets the same practice question/repsondus question to test the system. This question shows up on the exam, so technically it's free points. The workload for the class is not bad, but there is a lot covered in ten weeks so make sure to study as you go along. I should have gotten a B in the class but he curved to a B+ which is very nice. Towards the last few weeks, he did offer 4 extra credit points and two respondus questions for the final, instead of one.

Lavelle has been teaching this course at UCLA for what seems like decades, and because of that he has every resource in place for students to take advantage of to prepare for exams. In other words, people have no excuse to complain about their performance because there's always some resource you never took advantage of that resulted in a poor score.

I was in the first ever iteration of the hybrid version of this class, and I can attest that it was no different from being in the class normally (especially if you're prone to skipping lecture anyway). Those in this version have access to lecture recordings and different recordings that Lavelle posts himself. Watching either of these will get you the same amount of knowledge you need for the exams. In regards to Lavelle himself, he seems like a sweet old guy who smiles a lot, dances to music at the beginning of class, and cares about student learning. He goes through topics extremely slowly and clearly to make sure that people know what they're doing but focuses on the wrong topics during lecture in my opinion. A lot of his lectures were essentially derivations of equations, which are sections that I would normally skip in a textbook if I came across them, and very little is focused on problem solving. You can also totally get away with not going to the weekly workshops. All the problems he covers are the same as what you've already seen during lecture recordings.

Tests in this class were another type of beast I have never encountered in my educational career. There are two midterms that are 15 questions each, all multiple choice. Unfortunately this means that if you miss a single one, you've already got a 93-94 percent on the exam, so there's no room for error if you want an A in this class. There are also usually a couple of trick questions in there as well. Tests were more conceptual and therefore more confusing than a math based exam, which would leave you feeling like you did well right after just to find out that you did horribly when scores came out. I also don't understand why it takes a week to see scores for a multiple choice exam taken on Canvas. The final is 25 questions long, exact same format and just as challenging. There's no true way to prepare for the questions you're going to see besides doing all 1000 problems Lavelle assigns (optionally) on his syllabus and praying your critical thinking skills are sharp enough to figure out whatever problems are thrown at you. I feel very lucky to have escaped this class with an A the way that I did (went to one UA session all quarter and skimmed the practice problems the night before the exams bc I was very short on time), there were many others who did so much more work than I did who did not fare as well. Much luck to anyone who needs to take this class and has a busy schedule.