If you are taking this course with Professor Bouchard, this is what you should expect:
Professor:
- does not motivate yet strongly discourage learning in class. Through the course of this semester, he has been adamant in his way of teaching, rejecting any challenges raised by the students and got irritated easily, responding “If you do not believe in X concept, you should not do science”.
- does not answer student’s questions after class; give only overly general responses or merely “you should know this”.
- scares students in class, constantly claiming that he is not afraid to fail seniors.
- fails to retreat students’ equally; have preference over some selected group of students; always treat these students with patience while ignoring or occasionally castigating other less preferred students. A concrete example is that, whenever I get answers to questions he raises wrong in class, Prof. Bouchard consistently used discouraging words like “Wrong” and “No” and did not let me continue answering the question, whereas he treats other student with much more patience, using words like “try harder” or “thinker deeper” while waiting for their answers. Such disparity in treatment directly impacted my passion for this class and discouraged me from participating in class discussion or engage in intellectual thinking.

TA:
- highly unfamiliar with the course material, could not help with students’ lab report or questions related to class material
- demonstrate unprofessionalism in grading: carelessly glance over students’ lab report carefully and do not assign grades based on a uniform standard; fail to respond to students’ re-grading request when points are unfairly deducted

But Professor Bouchard's notes are very clear and the course will indeed improve your Matlab skill and stats to a great extent. Even though the average score of the test is around or below 30/100 and the first lab report grade is also 30/100, I received satisfactory scores for this class. If you study really hard your hard work will pay off.

If you are reading this, then more than likely you have heard horror stories about Bouchard and 114. And, you also probably don't have much of a choice about taking this class. But, let me address a few things.

The class is very difficult, no lies here. On top of the lab reports, Louie gives the hardest homework assignments I ever had at UCLA, and exams aren't a walk in the park (although if you study and do the hw they actually aren't all that bad). Ultimately, however, I ended up appreciating the class. Louie is very rigorous, derived, and straight forward in his lectures, and ultimately the lectures are clear. He also provides incredibly detailed notes, which are long but you MUST study them to do well. Be sure to go to the TA's to make sure your lab reports are well written, as you shouldn't lose sight of the fact that they are the biggest portion of your grade. The class is hard, and you will have to work your tail off, but Bouchard is actually a cool guy, he just enjoys challenging people.

The previous reviews are pretty accurate, but I’ll try to tell you what this class was like online during COVID. First of all, there were multiple times this quarter when I thought to myself: this is the worst, most miserable class I’ve ever taken. We felt like we were set up to fail. The homeworks were trash, long, and confusing. The lab reports asked for a way too much, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing at any moment. He wants you to catch on to a lot of Matlab commands and detailed statistics concepts very quickly. If you get a chance, maybe do some beginner Matlab tutorials before you start this class. This class was the first time in all my years of undergrad that I pulled all-nighters, and I pulled many of them. He did the flipped classroom thing, but as a result, lecture felt so useless and like a complete waste of time. For the lab, we basically just got sent the data and wrote the reports as if we actually did the experiments.

Louis himself: total jerk, no doubt about it. Too many people stayed silent during this class and were probably afraid to reach out for help, but for the brave souls who did, he basically would roast them every time they spoke. He kept telling us that anxiety is normal after he gave us an oral final, and that this class is supposed to be hard, and that we are supposed to be struggling. Kind of a bummer that he has to teach since he really doesn’t look like he’s into it at all. However, our collective jaws dropped Week 10, when students started expressing concerns over the George Floyd protests. To our surprise, much like the Grinch, Louis’s heart grew three sizes that day. We didn’t even think he had one. He probably doesn’t want this to be known, but he made our final presentation and final oral exam optional. And at the end of the quarter, he didn’t give anyone less than B-. All that pain, all that suffering, was perhaps worth it.

That being said, we had some incredible TAs that saved our asses. They graded pretty generously and were pretty understanding, and they seemed to provide you the help you need as long as you showed you were putting in some effort.
Moral of the story: form study groups for the homeworks, get started on the lab reports EARLY and I mean EARLY, go to TA office hours, don’t get on Louis’s bad side. I don’t think I learned a single thing all quarter besides maybe how to graph a histogram on Matlab.

If you aren’t religious, you better start praying once you enroll in Bouchard’s class. The previous reviews hit the nail on the head. This class right here will be your most miserable in your entire undergrad. The lectures and labs are not connected at all, in lecture you will cover in depth statistics concepts that will leave you lost. In lab, you basically get assigned 4 experiments with no context given whatsoever. They did oral quizzes to make sure you were good with the theory before you could even enter lab. So they don’t teach you these experiments in lecture, but expect you to know it in lab. These experiments range from being 20 page protocols of some high level physics grad school shit that will leave you lost, to experiments that actually aren’t so bad but only one piece of paper given with no information on how to do data analysis or understand the theory behind the experiment, so you basically have to pray you can figure this out on your own. All figures have to be done using MATLAB, which they also expect you to teach yourself. The labs themselves, you’ll be standing there for 4-8 hours a week, lost and confused cause the equipment is from the 1990s or early 2000s and will most likely break down and give you shit data. You have to do error analysis and propogation on your lab reports, which also isn’t taught in lecture. To top it off, these lab reports are graded on the expectation that you write a paper at a PhD publication level (literally quoting the TA here). You won’t get your lab report grades back till weeks after the deadline, so you won’t even know how you’re doing in the class, and when you do get your lab report grade back, it’ll most likely be in the 20-40% range. The homeworks Bouchard gives are also completely long and unreasonable, when you also have these lab reports to write. You will feel like there’s never enough time to get everything done and you will be lost on every assignment. You will be stressing the entire quarter. Bouchard himself doesn’t give a fuck at all, don’t even try to go to him for help.

All that being said, try your best to get started on everything early, and if you’re completely stuck, go to your TAs for help, and show them that you’re trying your best and struggling. For the homeworks, even if you can’t do all the problems, just do something to get credit. You will definitely get some extremely low scores on multiple assignments, but it seems the curving is done pretty leniently. I myself bombed the midterm and one of the labs, and had no idea how to do some of the homeworks, and I got an A in the class. This will just be something you have to put 150% effort into and not overthink the terrible raw scores/not knowing anything and get through.

We only had two easy homework assignments the entire quarter (probably cause he didn't care enough, but hey I'm not complaining). Labs were done in pairs. We were given two weeks to complete a lab but running the actual experiment usually only took a day. Analysis for some labs was impossible without help from the TAs, but all in all, it was alright. If this is the only chemistry class you need, like it was for me, it was definitely manageable. But yeah, the class is designed poorly, to say the least.

Tbh, I liked the professor, along with many of my peers. That's probably because we had several classmates that were on par with class materials and engaged a lot with the professor during lectures. He was also pretty cool during the final presentation.

The only class I've had that's miserable enough to warrant a review.

...The curve was incredibly lenient, though.