There are a lot of bad reviews about Kwon, but, unless she changed suddenly, she is now a very nice and efficient professor. Objectively, she has done nothing horrible this entire quarter and instead makes the occasional joke and is very willing to teach. She is clearly experienced, the consistency in her lecture is easily noticeable, especially if you look at her past recordings.

The only hard part is that the entire grade was based off exams. 20%, 20%, 60% for midterms and then the final respectively. How to succeed? Do practice exams. Do all of them. (She reuses questions) Get course hero, and you will find the class much more manageable. (I have not even looked at the hw tbh)

P.S. Do the bloody past exams. Do more than the ones she sends you. No joke, had midterms where I knew all the questions beforehand. Look very specifically at the answer keys, there are some points where she looks for very specific things, even just words (e.g. extremely stable vs stable).

I agree with recent reviews that the older ones are not representative of Dr. Kwon as a professor. She is far from some evil professor who does not answer questions and roasts students. In short, she was a very clear and straightforward professor who was by far one of the smartest people I had ever met and it showed in how organized and structured her lectures were.
Grading Scheme: 20% Midterm 1, 20% Midterm 2, 60% Final with assigned textbook problems (that were optional but I HIGHLY recommend to practice and get all of the reactions down).
Lectures: Kwon only lectures on the white board, I highly recommend sitting as close to the front as you can because of this. She does write very fast so I recommend either reading the textbook chapter beforehand (she tells you which one to read and what section) and having pre-written notes down to follow along. I also recommend taking pictures of the board, she doesn't post any lecture notes beforehand and at least for Winter '23, she didn't have recorded lectures either.
Exams: VERY DIFFICULT! The exam material itself wasn't hard or intentionally tricky, but the amount of work needed to do in short time. On average the midterms were 9-11 pages for 50 minutes and the final was 20 pages for the final. But like older reviews said, she reuses so many exam questions. I absolutely recommend getting on finding any sort of test bank and getting a hold of as many old exams as possible, those are your best form of practice and I promise at least 30-40% of those questions I had seen before on old exams.
Tips to succeed: Kwon LOVES nomenclature, so make sure you know how to name molecules! She often does complex, tricky molecules with multiple functional groups and tricky names, but if you can do those they are easy exam points. She also wants you to recognize complex molecules like caffeine, capsaicin, vanillin etc. Pay attention in lecture when she brings up complex molecules and names them, they are likely the ones she'll ask about. I can't stress enough how important it was to actually read the book. There are so many free PDFs everywhere! At the very least, skim through and write down the reactions and mechanisms and leave space in your notes for when you attend lecture so you can easily follow along. Lastly, the most difficult part of the class comes after the second midterm. For me personally, Diels-Alder and organometallic catalysis was the hardest thing I've learned at UCLA, it requires so much mental gymnastics and imagination to even do the problems, and it doesn't help we only have like 2 weeks to learn it. It is also the highest yield questions on the final! Don't slow down after the 2nd midterm and make sure to get as much help as possible on those topics. Lastly, if Jeremy is still a TA PLEASE TAKE HIS DISCUSSION! He is literally the second coming of Kwon and is beyond intelligent and an amazing chemist, he helped so much with reinforcing the content.

Professor is amazing! I really enjoyed her class, the first time I can say I genuinely liked chemistry. She is very passionate about her subject and is engaging in lectures. Make sure to know nomenclature and the problems she does in lecture. Some of them appeared on exams! One thing: make sure to sit in the first row bc she writes everything on the the whiteboard and it is simply impossible to see anything in the back.

Professor Kwon was a decent ochem professor, but she had the misfortune of following my two quarters with Professor Pham. I didnt really like the shift from an organized slide based class to a sometimes messy whiteboard only class. Also, her final was insanely cracked, as she ripped out a graduate level synthesis with reagents I've never seen before. However, she did curve the final a lot apparently so take that as you will.

I can't believe how many good reviews there are for this professor, while I can still remember the horror of this class 2 years later. So no. if you are not a masochist or dead set on ochem as your career (you can still find nicer professors!), avoid this Kwon+30C combination at all cost! I don't say this very often, and I've taken Baugh and Bouchard and Felker. Yet let me repeat this seriously. Avoid Kwon+30C at all cost.

About Kwon: She is difficult to approach.
She is the kind of person who would stare at you and question you. When I showed my midterm to her, she casually commented that she would have taken off more points. It took some courage even to ask her questions. Of course you wouldn't know as much about ochem as she did, and the reaction mechanisms were not intuitively straightforward. But she could put you on the spotlight and ROAST you if you have a different opinion on a question. I almost cried at the end of one of her office hours. From my experience, she is unnecessarily difficult to approach.

About hw: A LOT.
She assign homework in a style like "do all textbook problems except for x, y, and z". I think that's enough being said.

About her exams: A lot of reuse + English puzzle.
If you have to take this course, review all past exams, go to her office hours(most if not all), and choose Andy as your TA. For a good grade in her course, these are almost mandatory, unless you are an ochem genius. She reused past midterms 90% and exam questions came directly from Andy's discussion sections. Don't get me wrong, Andy is helpful and nice. But in his discussion he would be going over a completely different set of practice problems that are much harder than the lecture material and the homework problems. Remember this is also an ochem course. If you don't go over the problem in his section, there is almost no way you'll know a specific mechanism or an addition site.

Her exams can also be a word puzzle. This is two years later and I could still remember getting points taken off because of an adverb. Specifically, I forgot to write "extremely" in describing the stability of benzene or some aromatic ring. Yeah. I'm not even joking. Points off for an adverb in an ochem course. I don't even have any exam review suggestions at this point anymore. If she gave you a short answer in her practice exam, I guess remember it word by word? And read her exam question carefully even if they are very tight on time. In one of my midterms half of the class got one question wrong because of her wording.
And definitely remember the structures of ochem molecules like capsaicin, caffeine, etc. You would be asked to perform like google and recognize them in exam.
Keep your expectation low. In our final she gave us an one page long total synthesis question, and tbh I liked working through that question. But it is EXTREMELY UNFAIR to put that question on exam because it involved a lot of complicated molecules that I had never seen in my life(nor in this course). And it was also difficult to find the functional group going through the reaction. Again, don't panic if she does that again. It happens. I totally screwed up that question and I didn't fail this course.

All being said, I learned a lot from 30C, because I worked really hard for this class, probably much harder than the other 3 courses I was taking that quarter combined. I did not enjoy this class, and I do not like ochem. If you're an ochemist you might have very different perspective. I am not compatible with Kwon's teaching style, but some of my classmates were very happy. In the end I still survived this class, and whoever's reading this comment, you'll be fine too.

Kwon is a decent professor; her lectures are engaging and she does a good job at getting the class passionate about organic chemistry. The topics that we covered are pretty challenging, but they were interesting at the same time.
The key to succeeding in this class is getting a hold of Kwon's old exams: she reuses a decent amount of problems from previous years' exams. One of the TAs went over problems from her old exams in discussion, and that was really useful. During Winter 2019, the grade breakdown was 20% midterm 1, 20% midterm 2, and 60% final - so you have to take the final really seriously. The two midterms were not too bad, but the final was very challenging. There was one question on the final which gave you the starting material and the final product, and you had to fill in the boxes in between (kind of like a guided synthesis) - however, this question was brutal as it came from a research article that had some reagents that no one could decipher.
Overall, this class was challenging, but it's worth the effort if you're passionate about o-chem!

Kwon is a very knowledgable professor, though intimidating at times. Don't let that stop you from taking this course though, because she turned out to be a very kind and understanding professor as the course went on. There is a lot of material covered in 30C, but if you have made it this far into the 30 series, you have probably already come to expect that. She writes very quickly at times and her handwriting can get pretty small, so I would suggest sitting in the front half of the lecture hall. Overall, she follows the textbook closely but would add in some information, especially when it comes to nomenclature. She really enjoys talking about Nobel Peace Prize winners, but that is just extra information. It is important, however, to take her seriously when she says "know this molecule". There was a whole page on our final exam that asked us to recognize molecules like glucose, capsaicin, and caffeine. In regards to exams, the most important thing is to go to the test bank and find as many past exams as you can, and take the time to go over those problems because she tends to recycle problems on her midterms and final. She will also post a practice exam with the answer key prior to the exams, but you may need much more than that. The averages for our midterms were pretty high for an organic chemistry class, and I do not know what the average for the final was. However, I do believe she scaled the class in some way. The final exam is a little bit tougher than the midterm exams because there aren't many released past final exams. In fact, there was one very long problem on our final where we synthesized a complex drug molecule step by step, when we were given the reagents and had to draw the product after each step. Our final exam time was extended by 20 minutes, probably for this reason. However, if you work through many of the practice exams, you will be able to solve most of the problems easily. She does suggest certain textbook problems, but I did not find them too helpful. Another useful source is going to discussion section because the TAs will go over problems from past practice exams that they picked up from the test bank as well. Overall, her class is very rough because your entire grade depends on two midterms and the final exam, but if you put in the work, you will get the grade that you deserve. Again, she is a very knowledgeable professor, so if you want to learn more about organic chemistry, she is the one to go to. This course offers so much valuable information and really puts your endurance to the test, but it was worth my time.

I am expecting quite a lot of downvotes since she was generally well-regarded by most of the students.

Professor Kwon must be an excellent organic synthesis chemist at UCLA, otherwise she would have kicked out almost immediately. I don't have problems with her lectures - they are very organised, efficient and often engaging. However, I cannot stress enough that her exams are absolute bullshit. A lot of the problems are merely direct copies from her previous exams, sometimes from her PRACTICE EXAMS - and I can't come up with any reasonable explanation other than that she is too lazy to put new questions. Some of the questions also were either extremely tedious (i.e. unfair) to solve within a limited time period, or are purely made just to fuck you up with English and wording, not with knowledge of chemistry (beware those aromaticity questions). Furthermore, she really needs to change her attitude towards students and ESPECIALLY TOWARDS HER GRADUATE STUDENTS. Essentially the "Aug. 25, 2017" reviewer tells you everything you should know about Prof Kwon as a person. Overall great and efficient lectures, COMPLETELY ECLIPSED by her poor exams and personality. Maybe recommend the class itself, but if you are planning to go to UCLA grad school related to the field of organic chemistry, try to avoid her labs.

This class is absolute fire. Kwon is really funny and engaging with the students. The class is really tough but even the people who are struggling really like the professor. The material is novel and interesting and if you like problem solving and Chem 30A then you will really like this class. There's a lot of material but it is manageable. Would definitely recommend this class

Let me take this opportunity to make a personal attack on this woman and her horrendous character. She is very good at her research - arguably one of the the best organic synthetic chemists at UCLA. Although a very knowledgeable professor who can explain concepts well, she does not understand that she is not lord over students and that she needs to treat students as human beings. Bitch, you ain't my boss, and you better not treat me as your employee.
Now, this woman is known to be crazy. "Professor, could you please write bigger on the board" was a request heard almost everyday. Once, she retorted to this request by asking the girl who made the request "do you want to come down here and write instead?" (No citation found).
Anyway, I would call this woman the Heinrich Himmler of UCLA Chemistry. She is very efficient, don't get me wrong. But don't forget that Heinrich Himmler was too.
So Kwon can drive away with her arrogance and her delusional sense of superiority. This world would appreciate more genuine people.
Tests are not very easy. She recycles problems from old tests (almost 90% of the time). The final had a very long, unseen problem that combined everything learnt in the class. It was a very good problem, and I thoroughly enjoyed working it out. I love synthetic organic chemistry, but this woman's corrosive personality has dented my passion for the subject.