I took this class online freshman year because Felker was the only option for Chem 20A. If you have the option of taking it from someone else you should definitely do that. If you are stuck with him however, be aware that you will have to learn most of the material on your own. His lectures do not reflect his tests, and stray from the main topics, or go over an easy topic way too long. They are also sometimes handwritten, and it is often illegible. I relied almost completely on OWL which was a blessing because it explains how to do each problem in depth; I would definitely practice those problems a lot, as well as looking at past test banks.

don't take him at all costs. as a freshman, his classes made me lowkey want to quit my major. lol.
his lectures made me so tired. also since they were recorded because of covid, they were almost always over time. like the lecture is supposed to be 50 minutes but he'd go 10-20 minutes overtime in EVERY. SINGLE. LECTURE. he started off on slides. then went to giant typed paragraphs. then by the end of the course it was just his handwriting. bruh i couldn't even read it.
his exams were literally so hard. he never went over how to do any of the math but that's basically all that we were tested on. the TAs were helpful, kinda, but if they had no idea you were screwed.
also the final. he added some things on there that we never even learned.

My main complaints were lack of engagement and clarity with the professor, not only about the content of the class but even about the grading. I had absolutely no idea what grade I would get because he didn't communicate with the students nor the TAs what curve he would assign and what grade would be given to the average.

Personally, my discussion section did help me engage with more of the material, but I will say that many of the answer keys were not the same as other discussions, so we never knew what the final answers were which was quite frustrating.

Overall, if you can get another professor, I would. You might be okay if you can teach yourself from the textbook (which is what I thought), but that may not work out too well.

(class was taken during covid)
bad at lecturing, not very helpful, if you can pick someone else then do
most of my learning was done from the homework given on owlv2 (online quiz website)
if I hadn't taken chemistry in HS I would probably not have passed using solely felker's lectures; you will surely need to find something else to supplement
workload is about 20 problems per week which are fairly comprehensive

Not the class you want to take for your first quarter at UCLA, but if you're in a situation like me you're kind of stuck with it.
There's a big disconnect in this class between what Felker teaches and what he expects you to know. A lot of times he would mention something generally in a lecture and then when you showed up for discussion that week it would be asking specific questions about that thing.
Lectures were all pre-recorded. Sometimes Felker would would be talking about one thing while showing another because he forgot to switch screens. A lot of times I would see one day's lecture hour long lecture with a second video correcting something he said wrong in that first one.
OWLv2 was the most helpful part of this class. Eventually I stopped watching the lectures and started just doing the OWL assignments to learn what was in them.
My TA Colin did the best he could. He only had 50 min with us a week and tried to help us however he could. The problem was that 90% of the discussion section were cameras off muted the whole time and the answer key for the problems we were given was wrong.
Felker also doesn't tell the TAs anything about the tests and is intentionally vague about what will be on them. Felker always throws a curveball question at you on the tests.
I wish you good luck in taking this class

A lot of this class felt like self-learning from the textbook since the professor's lectures(all prerecorded) weren't that good. He lectured conceptual topics that he didn't really connect to the math-based homework. His exams were all math-based so you really had to practice the textbook problems on your own to do well.

I don’t really agree with a lot of the comments here. Prof Felker is very strict but unlike some people he always make it very clear what he wants you to do. The tests were hard but nothing were totally unexpected or weird. He will answer your questions as long as you ask them clearly. The problem with this class is that you really need to figure out how to manage your time and use the resources. Another thing good about this class is that there is a lot of communication between TAs and the professor, and you can feel that the class is definitely not a mess.

10 out of 10 will not recommend this class to others. I want to believe he means well but, his teaching style says the opposite. We literally spent a week on something minor while we rushed our last few chapters in two weeks. This guy even gave lectures during the Thanksgiving holiday for god's sake. His 'lecture slides' are preposterous. The first few weeks, he used slides with literal essays instead of points on them and he just read the whole essays during his lectures. Then, he transferred into teaching with documents that were literally essays with so much fluff that you won't even recognize what's important and what's not. If you think it's bad enough up till now, you're wrong. He doesn't disappoint (in this area of course). He finally taught us with his effing handwritten notes. And boy, trust me, his handwriting is not a sight to behold. His lectures are so convoluted that I self-learned the entire class material (and got a higher-than-average score nonetheless). I really hope he improves how he teaches so future students won't have to deal with this kind of things anymore.

As many of you reading the other reviews, I was extremely nervous about the class. I haven't taken AP chem, and only took regular chem in HS 4 years prior. I had no recollection of the material and didn't even remember what a periodic table looks like. For all of you like me, scared and troubled by the 2 star ratings, please read this.
It is in your best interest to review the basics of stoichiometry before the class even starts. The first few chapters cover it, and knowing the material will make the first few weeks, as well as 50%-ish of Midterm 1, manageable. Felker's lectures are monotone, long, and boring. He teaches the material, but not in a way that is helpful to a student learning it. I like to think of the way he teaches as explaining a topic from your profession on a first date. He glances over the important foundations, and uses big words and concepts that make the overall idea seem impressive and comprehensive. Superficially, this is awesome! But in reality, it's pretty difficult to actually understand the material when it's presented this way. That being said, it is your responsibility to do practice problems and watch videos (O-Chem Tutor on Youtube). If you do that, along with previous tests from the BruinWalk test bank, you should be totally fine in the class. Getting a B is very manageable, but you have to put in the work for it. The material is not intuitive, so if you drop the ball for even a single week, you can be extremely screwed for the exams. The homework is basically free points. The program for homework, OWL, is so bad it's disgusting. But you get 6 attempts to the problems and get answer solutions each time it's incorrect. It's also not a ton of work, so homework is relatively chill. Overall...meh. Felker isn't a Walter Lewin type of professor, but he doesn't go out of his way to fail each student. Ultimately, the class is whatever you make of it, with a decent grade being very achievable. So if you're stuck here, don't stress too much. Just put in a tad more effort in the form of self learning and you'll be fine.

While I learned a lot about chemistry in this class, it was such a bad experience to do so. First of all, if you're taking this class with any professor, Organic Chemistry Tutor is the go-to legend on YouTube. He's the most useful resource for understanding the conceptual parts of the course more so than specific problem solving skills, but step one is to understand the question so it's helpful. The part that I hated most about this class was the way in which he presented the content to us. At least for COVID times, he would post slides that we're simply walls of text. And that's IF he even had slides to go off of. At a certain point, it seemed like prof. Felker ran out of slides so he resorted to a typed out document that is comparable to an essay. Just another wall of text. Then finally towards the end of the quarter, he seemed to run out of those documents as well so we were stuck with his scanned, handwritten notes, which were also simply walls of text.

Anyway, those were the worst parts to me, and I'm sure to many other students. As a professor, he just doesn't seem to care about teaching well. If you're stuck with him, it really isn't the end of the world. It's still possible to get a good grade in this class, without a doubt. This was the class that I put most of my time into as far as studying, and it seemed to pay off. Yeah these reviews seem really discouraging, they were to me too ten weeks ago, but if you put the time into it and honestly with a bit of curve generosity, you could pull off a decent-to-good grade. Don't stress too much because that'll just make things worse. Find a group of people to work with and study. That's my best piece of advice for this class.

Out of all that is bad, there is one good thing about prof. Felker. He responds to his emails pretty quickly. Granted, for multiple emails, I've asked him questions in the format of "do we need _____ OR _______" and his responses were always just "yes." Either he doesn't understand what "or" means or he just doesn't pay enough attention to give you useful responses. I'm confident it's the latter.