Do you like hours of daily homework assignments, not covering anything in lecture, and being tested on things you never learned because the professor was too occupied with bragging about his personal achievements to actually teach? Me neither, but that's the gist of Weiss' class. For the first half of the quarter we would cover roughly one to two powerpoint slides during an entire class period. I would have just stopped coming, except that lectures were how we turned in our daily homework assignments that constituted several hours of reading and textbook problems the night before. Weiss also assumed that we had already learned thermodynamics (the main topic of this class) in high school and thus didn't cover it in his own lectures, just assigned extra homework on it as "review". The discussions are also mandatory because any given week you might have a graded quiz on what you supposedly covered in lecture that week. When asked a question, Weiss will likely derail entirely from giving any sort of sensible answer and instead talk about something he did with his kids one time. There are no study guides for the exams, just a long list of possible topics which is actually just a list of all the course material. One nice thing is that the TA's, who are all just people who work in Weiss' lab, host review sessions before the exams. The unfortunate part is that the sessions always go at least an hour longer than expected, spend a very long time on basic concepts, and then speed through the advanced things. The tests themselves are often worded in a confusing way and are not similar to the homework problems. They are equally conceptual and computational but you are not allowed a calculator.
TLDR: Unhelpful, lots of homework, mandatory lectures and discussions. If you value your free time or GPA, avoid this class.

First off, Professor Weiss loves chemistry and loves teaching it; however, as evident from numerous other reviews, this doesn't always translate to the best learning environment for students.

The class really is structured more like an honors class--which is what he taught for 8+ years at Penn State. Yes, the homework load is heavy and graded hard. Yes, the tests really cannot be studied for and do indeed test your ability to think and reason chemically. Yes, his slides are quite complex and hard to absorb.

BUT, though this class, you can really gain an appreciation for true chemistry that is applicable in the real-world rather than in the crappy book. I am a mechanical engineering student and am actually sad now that this was my last chem class.

I WOULD NOT recommend taking this class if you're looking for an easy, good grade (that's Li). I WOULD recommend taking chemistry with Professor Weiss if you're up for a challenge and tests that conceptually prod your understanding of chemistry to previously unattained depths.

This professor inspired me to pursue materials science/chemistry even though I'm originally a biochemistry major.

He's highly overqualified to teach the material for this class which is on par with AP/IB chemistry level material, so basically he gets really bored with the material and goes on tangents and tells stories about actually interesting things that go on in the chemical world. Come the first midterm, I was afraid that all this application would get tested on but turns out it wasn't, or at least for 95% of it. In fact the tests go over material that he heavily emphasizes nearly everyday, or does demos for or that the TAs go over.

And for the TAs, he pulls them from his own research group so they make for a really great team to provide all the resources and proper learning experience for you.

For the material itself, throughout the quarter he covers topics that will appeal to everyone's major, from chemical engineering, to biochemistry. His office hours are a bit different in that it functions more as storytime where he talks about really fascinating things that he's working on or other people in the department.

The tests are actually pretty easy but require you to understand the material and more importantly understand what he emphasizes to you. His goal in this class is to build your chemical intuition so he will test on it. He doesn't care for memorizing or naming things but he cares more for understanding chemical relationships and WHAT will happen and WHY.

I don't know how much use this review will be considering he mentioned he is trying to teach the honors section next year, but the reviews from last year are from when he aimed higher and expected more from the students although he says it didn't work out how he foresaw it. Winter 2017 was easier and less information heavy than Winter 2016, the last time he taught 20B

This class is basically just a stupid amount of work . I spent about 20 hours (not exaggerating) on homework that was due EVERY class and went to office hours at least once a week. I scored above average on tests, but the homework is what kills you. Get a good TA, have them look over your homework/do the problems in OH. Weiss is not a good teacher, so you'll be relying heavily on your TA's. Weiss didn't curve for our class.

Let me start off by saying this: this professor has certainly gotten MUCH better from the last time he taught. That being said, he is still pretty much garbage. He has improved in the types of questions he asks on his midterms/final, and the relevance of those questions to what the course is suppose to be about (solubility, acid base, thermodynamics, gas laws, etc,, ya know, chemical energetics and change). However, he still goes off on tangents about the most useless topics ever, has terrible jokes and a terrible laugh, and still doesn't know how to teach. But he apparently did read his reviews at the end of the year and changed up his tests this quarter, which is a great sign compared to what he was testing on before (mass spectrometry, DNA, proteins, spectroscopy, stuff he talks about in his tangents basically). Basically, better tests, terrible teaching skills

I would highly recommend anyone else in terms of Chem 20B, but if you're stuck with Weiss, realize that there is still hope. THIS SAVED ME: if you write on your test that you realize that your answer is wack and completely wrong, or write down two answers and point out that you believe that one of them is correct, you will get some points back! In this class, ever. point. matters. In order to be successful, make sure you:

gather up all the points from doing the homework (10%)
Make some creative problems (5%)
Submit your homework on time (5%)
Do those reading memos (5%)
Show up to every discussion to take the quizzes (10%)--doing the example problems in the textbook will help with this! The textbook isn't great, but it's going to be your only guide in understanding the materials in this class. The TA can be decent, but I had a bad TA :/

Doing all those above to the best of your abilities is already 35% of your grade. And you are going to need every single goddamn point in this class. Make sure to go to the review sessions before every midterm; those will be your saviors for this class. As far as tests go, your best hope is the review sessions, past tests in the bruin test bank (try to get the more recent ones); his powerpoint slides aren't great and would not recommend you to use those.
The homework vs. what the TA's say in discussion vs what Weiss says vs. the tests are all going to be different. Good luck.

This class is basically high school AP Chemistry with very few new things thrown in. The only part of this class that sucked was the homework. It doesn't seem like much on paper, but the textbook problems are pretty convoluted. The exams were fairly simple and in almost no way related to the homework, so feel free to Chegg the homework or something to get full points on that. The exams were graded pretty harshly due to their simplicity, so be wary of that. Just study with people who've had good experiences with AP Chem, and you should be fine.

Professor Weiss is a textbook narcissist. He cares more about himself than the class or the lectures. He his honestly overqualified to be teaching lower division chemistry. For a majority of the class, he proceeds to tell us stories about his personal life or from his research projects. On top of this, he assigns a ton of homework every single day and it's due the next class. The TAs for this class were not helpful either. You had to study almost everything on your own. The biggest problem is that you never know where to study for the exams from because the questions are not from his slides or the textbook or anything else. Would never recommend Weiss to anyone... just find a better alternative!

Professor Weiss was a fantastic teacher and just extremely interesting and kind in general. His office hours were always a blast and helped a lot.

Honestly, Weiss is a very enthusiastic person who genuinely enjoys going to lectures and even woke up at 4 in the morning one week to give skype lectures from abroad.

However, this class is really not the best place to learn anything that is in te course name "Chemical Energetics and Change". Towards the end of the first week, it was pretty apparent that the way that Weiss was teaching gas laws was overly simplified and not really helpful for students in doing the homework. In addition, he would occasionally interrupt the topic to start speaking about the various kinds of spectroscopies, which a lot of people found interesting, but it really took away from the time he could have spent teaching gas laws. Starting second week, I started going to Li's lectures because I felt that if I was going to learn anything this quarter about chemistry, it was not gonna be from this class.

I didn't know how bad the class was going to be though. Starting third week, we started thermochemistry while the homework followed the book and was on questions of phase equilibria. I think I gave up on trying to find what he talked about interesting when he went into semiconductors. It just was not what I felt that I wanted to or needed to learn from the course. When the unit got into thermodynamics, a lot of people were stuck on the harder problems because we had no idea whether to spend our time trying to keep up with what Weiss was teaching us, or to try to learn the concepts in the book to solve the homework problems.

Of course, the latter would have been very good for learning the topics we were supposed to in this course, but it probably would have killed my grade in this class. Even though the stuff we were supposed to be learning was gas laws and phase equilibria in the first 2 weeks, the first midterm (based on the first 2 weeks) largely tested the various types of spectroscopies. The second midterm, in turn largely tested electrochemistry and semiconductors while we were supposed to be learning thermodynamics. I don't think that the final had any material we were supposed to be learning in the course at all. The tests were all qualitative, usually involving very little math and mostly just describing how things work; really just regurgitating what he tells you.

The TA will probably be your lifeline in this course to doing homework and understanding either what the book tells you and what Weiss tells you. But that is also a lot of stuff to fit in 50 minutes so you should definitely go to office hours. Weiss's own office hours were actually pretty inconvenient for me and I didn't really like him anyways so I didn't go. But I heard that he doesn't really have anything that he could use to show students how to do problems; no whiteboard or chalkboard. So I guess the office hours are best for asking him questions on the lectures.

The class had 3 midterms, but everyone is allowed to drop one midterm. I really don't know how good that is if everyone gets curved at the end of the class though...

All in all, I really regret taking this professor, but I sat through Li's lectures and she completely skipped over acid-base equilibria. That is not to say that Weiss did it well, but rather that we understood that we had to self-teach ourselves it.

Professor Weiss is the smartest man I've ever met! He made this class very interesting and helpful for future purposes.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This class is extremely challenging. If you do not have the time to fully invest daily hours of work for this class, do not take it. This class' workload is 3 times more than the regular Chem 20B class. There are creative problems to do each week, literature assignments, and also homework from the book. On top of that, there is a final project (poster + paper) that must be completed and is worth 15% of your grade. The only way to achieve your best is to try very hard on the homework (worth 30% of the grade), and to try and score above average on the tests.
Also, stay in contact with the TA's because at times their information is very confusing and the guidelines are difficult to understand. My experience with the TA's was rather disappointing because of their harsh grading and lack of communication, so please make sure that you precisely understand want they want. You can always ask Paul for help if you feel lost.