First things first, I <3 Maher Henary. He's a very passionate and enthusiastic professor, and also has an entertaining lecture style (and a sexy accent). Chem 30AL is by far the most enjoyable lab class I have ever taken here at UCLA. The labs were pretty easy and he does a good job explaining the concepts. One thing that I didn't do until the final was read the techniques book, GET IT. It is like the textbook for the class. It explains things that Henary doesn't that will be on the midterm final. Its pretty easy to get a good grade in this class, its just a big time commitment. For the midterm and final, he gives practice problems. I highly suggest you learn and understand ALL of them. His tests will be very similar. Fun fun class, Henary makes it pretty fair in my opinion as well.

Class is easy but time consuming, even more so than in the past because Henary got rid of people having lab partners for most of the experiments (so now instead of doing post lab reports with a partner, you do it by yourself, which almost doubles the work you have to do). Easily takes up at least 7 hours a week, even if you find old labs to help you out. And that's just outside time doing reports, not including the fact there's 6 hrs of lab per week and one 1 hr lecture. I recommend not taking this class with other classes of equal or more time consumption (I am currently learning this the hard way). I hear his test averages are pretty low but theyre not that hard. Get and old test or two if u didn't retain general chem well or dont know how to do his practice test (SAC test bank has one or two). He's also a stingy grader, says class isn't curved. Seen old distributions, only 14% get As/A-s, but 65% Bs (easy B, very hard A). Experiments are straightforward, perhaps easier than 20L. His accent is amusing too.