Paul Weiss is one of the worst teachers I have ever had in my entire life. This man has no regard for how well his students actually learn. If there are other options for teachers in this class, take them. If you have the flexibility to wait a quarter and take it with a different teacher, do it. DO NOT TAKE HIS CLASS. During the class I heavily relied on my friend who had taken 20B a quarter before with a different professor. About halfway through the quarter we reached a point where she could no longer help me because we were learning stuff that wasn't even apart of regular 20B content. The entirety of that sentence alone should be a red flag enough. But to actually get in to Paul's teaching style, the bottom line is he doesn't actually teach. Each class I would try to pay attention and learn the content, yet each time probably 5 minutes in we reached the inevitable point where he would go on a rant about some medical device that his friend created or about his friend that he's about to go visit that has a noble prize or their own lab or is doing this great research. While normally I can appreciate a little bit of getting sidetracked, as it can make the content more interesting, his getting sidetracked has the exact opposite effect. He would go on for so long about topics that have nothing to do with the class it gave no chance for us to actually learn anything. Additionally, his lectures consisted of a series of slides, each composed of a long bulleted list of topics. He would proceed to "explain" the topics, but most of the explaining was what I described before, bragging about his cool friends and his personal life, or medical things that the majority of the class had no interest in knowing, or need to ever know. Because of that I stopped going to lectures a few weeks in. A week before the midterm I decided to go and see if we would actually learn any content (spoiler alert: we didn't), and I counted how many students were actually present in class. Out of the at least 120 students taking the course, 40 were present. That just goes to show how bad of a lecturer he really is. Now you may be wondering about homework and tests and the rest of the course. Surprise, they're just as bad. Each week he would assign homework that would take an insane amount of time, that also had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ELSE. Several times he stated that the lectures, homework, and readings were "complementary." They are anything but that. Put together they made no sense and made it impossible to actually know what content we needed to know for the exams. While both the midterms and the final were all open note, it doesn't matter. The tests would ask the most convoluted questions that he said would test our intuition. Shocker, I don't have the same intuition as someone who has been studying chemistry their entire life, and have only ever taken two other chemistry courses. Also, don't expect your TA to be of any assistance during this class either. In my discussion of at least 20 people, 4 of us regularly attended. This is because any time we asked a question about the test, or about the grading of the test, the reply was "I don't know, you would have to ask Paul." All in all, please do not take his class, it's not worth the extreme headache and time wasted. I wish I had just waited a quarter to take it with a different professor.

Most people feel relieved when they hear an exam is open-book, but not in Weiss's class. I genuinely do not understand how some students enjoyed this course with him. Without exaggeration, this was the worst class I have ever taken. No matter how many hours I studied, I never really knew how I did on the tests. Lectures aren’t recorded, and the modules are just slides with random, disconnected topics. The textbook doesn’t match what’s covered in lecture, and the discussion worksheets don’t prepare you for the exams at all. To be fair, I’ll give Weiss credit for being flexible and offering a diverse grading structure. Other than that, this is not a typical chemistry class, and I would not recommend it to anyone. I regret taking it with him.

Paul Weiss is a horrible professor, and I say this from the deepest place in my heart that I truly hope he never teaches another Chem 20B class ever again. It is clear from his lecturing style that he should remain behind a desk and continue to do research. His lectures consisted of slide shows that had bullet points with some important sentences, but mostly pictures of him with Nobel Prize winners. He would start on the topic at hand, then always ramble into tangents about a "funny" story of his old teaching days in Chem 20BH or an inventor he met in his free time. He claims that the homework, textbook readings, lectures, and discussion worksheets are "complementary to each other," but they are incompatible as the discussion worksheets were way behind the content we were "learning" in lecture, and the homework was so far ahead of the lecture content that I resorted to learning everything I had to know from the textbook and yet that still wasn't enough. When asked questions, he avoids giving a straightforward answer and is often quite patronizing. He kept saying he was preparing us for standardized tests in the future, like the MCAT, but this is general chemistry, where half the people taking it are engineering majors, who will not go on to take more chemistry or these tests he talks about and "prepares" us for. For the first midterm, we were blazing through topics that should have lasted us until the end of the quarter, and got so far that for the second midterm, we went outside of the scope of Chem 20B. If I wanted to take an organic chemistry class, I would have.

Furthermore, my TA was of no use when I asked him questions about the class's structure or the content that would be on the exams; he often said, 'I don't know' or 'I don't know why Paul Weiss does it like that.' Not only was Paul Weiss an inept lecturer, but he also asked the most mind-bending questions on exams that he expected us to know, when he never taught us that content. Although the exams were all open note, that is not an excuse to make the midterms 2 hours long and ask the most ridiculous questions that are all free response. Safe to say that Paul Weiss did NOT prepare us well for any of the exams, and I feel bad for his TAs and LAs who need to pick up the slack for his pathetic excuse of a review day. I would have much preferred to take a normal Chem 20B class where I wasn't constantly being given material from a previous Chem 20B Honors class that he taught in 2017. Lastly, Paul Weiss was so busy with his research that he would often leave town to attend forums and leave us with a sub which would have been a blessing except he left them a set of slides to go off of, which were just as useful as if he were to cancel the lecture all together.

Please, UCLA, never ever let him teach Chem 20B again. Instead, I think that the whole class would have preferred to take it in the fall with an actual qualified professor.

Ok this is somewhat incomplete seeing as I couldn't even complete his class. In full honesty, even though I dropped this class week 4, I still attended some of his lectures with my friends because this guy is definitely a character.

His class is basically all a bunch of different topics going on at the same time, and the expectation is that you learn all of it completely and effectively. What I mean is that all of the reading, the homework, the lectures, and the discussions were all disconnected from one another, but the midterms were comprehension based that combined every piece of material.

I would agree with the rest of the reviews that Weiss is kind of arrogant, however I really liked this about him. I would rather have an arrogant and engaging lecturer than someone who had no idea what they were talking about. He was pretty funny, and if you paid attention what he said didn't seem too crazy or outlandish. He just covered supplemental material during lecture, so it was pretty hard to make up. This made it pretty difficult because I had to miss an entire week of class due to personal reasons.

Anyway, the main complaints: homework was pretty time consuming considering that we wouldn't cover any of the content during lecture. Weiss was also really proud of the fact that he taught 20BH, the honors version of the class. As someone who took all of the honors physics 1 track, it made me laugh that he was always talking about how great that class was and how special they all were. I didn't feel affected by it, but it definitely could be bothersome to people. His lectures tended to go in places that didn't feel relevant but definitely were, so if you weren't paying attention it was harsh when it came time for midterms. The midterms were also held after lecture, so you had an extra time commitment which was kind of annoying.

pros: Weiss is entertaining as shit and if I wasn't graded in his class I would've loved it. The homework and discussion worksheets had higher weight in the class than the midterms, so if you messed up it was okay. Tests were completely open note, so you could've brought a lot of material to the test. I would say this class is somewhat comparable to an honors class, so if you're a chem major I would try and take Weiss because he's definitely a good contact. He promised basically everyone in the class research.

All in all, don't take chem 20B with Weiss if you just want a standardized chem class because it's a lot more than that. Just take 20BH if you want, or wait til you can get an easier prof.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.