Here's the thing. Chem 14BE is supposed to be a class that is more heavily focused on participation and interaction with your classmates. I took 14AE the quarter prior and absolutely loved it. HOWEVER, this class is not that. Professor Courey, while a genuinely nice guy, failed the majority of students as a teacher.

His lectures are easy to understand, his examples are simple and that sets your expectations. You would think 2 hour-long Pearson homeworks and weekly online quizzes alongside 3-4 hours dedicated each week to solving lab worksheets would give you an idea of what to expect on the final. NO. Twenty-five free-response calculation questions and a set of 12 CCLE type questions over a 3 hour period. I have never been screwed by a professor this hard in my 4 years at UCLA.

Compared to what I've heard about 14B, this class seems to dish out some hard tests and some assignments which I personally found very time-consuming and unnecessary. Such assignments were the PRWAs which are basically three essays that you have to write based off chemistry topics where your grade depends on whether or not your peers liked the essay (which some people are really harsh about). The final was a complete disaster as you may have read in the other reviews. Supposedly, this class was "enhanced", as another review said, so it's supposed to help people with weak chemistry backgrounds right? Wrong. You're better off taking 14B in short.

This class was reasonable both in workload and difficulty throughout the quarter up until the absolutely brutal final that was borderline cruel. It was not only incredibly difficult but much too long compared to any of his exams he gave all quarter (apparently this version had been shorted per the advise of out TA's !!). Probably about half the class didn't finish it and if anyone did, they felt really rushed. I had an A the entire quarter and after the final exam results came out I fell nearly 10%. The curve that he offered only really benefited those who did very well on the exam already, not helping anyone really impacted by the sheer length of the test and lost around 20+ points for questions answered. He also really did not care that the CCLE portion of the exam had technical issues for a few students, offering no answers on piazza to their concerns. For a pilot class that was supposed to be ENHANCED for students who needed a more thorough approach to learning general chemistry, he is unforgiving.

TL;DR: I would not recommend this course to anyone. Keep in mind that this review is also for 2022, so there was no insane final like Winter 2021.

Grade distribution:
Weekly homework: 4%
2 peer review writing assignments: 7%
10 POGILs: 8%
iClicker: 3% (65% of lectures had to be attended to get full credit)
Surveys: 1%
12 PTL quizzes: 8% (3 attempts given)
3 CMC quizzes: 9% (1 attempt given)
2 midterms: 30% (1 online due to COVID, 1 in-person)
Final exam: 30%

There was an overwhelming amount of assignments throughout the quarter, individually worth very little credit, yet not negligible. The weekly assignments and PTLs were very time-consuming. The 3 CMCs were very stressful, and only 1 attempt was given for each of these, despite multiple students asking for 2 attempts throughout the entire quarter. The average on the 1st CMC was 14.2/20, 14.3/20 on the 2nd, and 16.4/20 for the last. However, Courey did replace the overall CMC grade with the final exam grade if you did better on the final exam.

The 2 writing assignments were frustrating, as it was unknown what Courey specifically was looking for until it was time to actually peer review. It seemed like he expected in-depth knowledge despite a 500-word limit, which required a lot of time, along with guessing games as to what to focus on in these assignments. Despite the abundance of assignments, the exams were still worth a large portion of the grade, not too much of a safety net compared to 14B.

Since the first 4 weeks of the course were online, we had 1 online midterm, 1 in-person midterm, and 1 in-person final. The online midterm was of much more difficulty than the in-person exams, but that does not detract from the overall fact that all of these exams were difficult. The only saving grace was one of the TAs, who sent out review documents that were very helpful and demonstrated what to focus on for these exams (however, this TA will no longer be at UCLA).

The weekly POGILs were often written to be very lengthy. Outside of the 2-hour discussion sessions, my group would have to meet for a couple of hours most weeks just to finish these.

As for the lectures, he read off the slides (he does provide the slides beforehand, which is useful), although he often skipped over slides. A significant portion of time was given to a few students who asked questions (often straightforward or just repetitions of what he had just said).

Personally, I also did not find Courey to be very accommodating or friendly, unlike some of the other reviews. For example, this is a very small thing, but he would never acknowledge students saying goodbye to him; he'd either just stare at them or just pretend not to hear it, even though others could obviously hear it.

All in all, I would HIGHLY not recommend this course or this professor.

This class was brutal. I easily spent hours studying for it every day (when they asked how many on the mid-quarter survey I sob-laughed), and if the other two classes I was taking hadn't been relatively easy I'm not sure how this would have gone.

However, I might still recommend this class if you like having extra padding for your grade compared to 14B (it's not much, but at least it's something). In general, the TAs were great - Mariah was a godsend and hosted review sessions before the CMCs and final, and I also attended my TA's office hours religiously every week (they were very helpful, but that should help give you an idea of how much of a time commitment this class is).

In terms of materials though...after taking Queen Casey for 14AE I was expecting the ones for 14BE to be useful and manageable, but they were not.
The LA worksheets were extremely long (so long that the LAs began to just go over the answers without giving us time to work the problems), and my group only finished the POGIL within the two hours allotted for discussion about three times. In complete honesty, the LA worksheets were not super helpful for the assessments, but if you plan to attend the workshops I would recommend trying the worksheets beforehand. However, even the LAs sometimes struggled with solving the problems.
You'll be expected to read chapters of the textbook and Courey's PowerPoint(s), watch a short video, and complete a PTL quiz as part of every module (before lecture, so kind of like the LS7 series' flipped classroom setting). In 14AE I could understand what was going on even without having read the textbook, but reading the textbook is ESSENTIAL to Courey's class. His PowerPoints are extremely long and dense (with lots of clarifying information written in the Notes section), and it can be hard to pinpoint the really important information. During lecture he often skipped slides ("because they were in his videos") and didn't show all the steps when solving the math problems (if you are confused, ASK HIM!! He was pretty good about explaining things as long as someone asked about it).

There were two CPR assignments. The second involved a primary source research paper as well as a secondary source web article. A lot of people found the prompt difficult, and I sat in on office hours just to understand what he was asking. For some reason, a lot of people were also pretty harsh graders, so just remember to be kind to your peers - you all need the points. In addition, pray that you don't get such a bad grade you need to dispute the peer review part of the CPR, because he very rarely granted it.

In terms of assessments, there were a lot of trick questions on the CMCs, so as a class we performed pretty poorly on them. However, the worst part was that many of us didn't realize they were trick questions until we got our grades back - I feel like I only understood how important some of the concepts were after I got them wrong, which was not ideal. The midterms (one was online this quarter and one was in person) and final were more manageable, and he always gave enough time. I generally think the final was fair, but it was worth a big part (30%) of our grade. However, he offered to replace our scores in the CMC category with the final if we did better on the latter.

Some final notes:

In terms of studying, I would recommend making a study guide of the important equations and concepts (he gives you a sheet with the equations, but you need to know WHEN/HOW to use them). There were a lot of conceptual questions (T/F) on all of the assessments, so make sure that your understanding of the concepts is ROCK SOLID.

In the beginning of the quarter we didn't have a class Campuswire (he made a few discussion threads on BruinLearn, but no one used them), so if that happens again ask him to make one.

This class was certainly something. It forced me to develop new study habits I didn't know I could develop even after a year at UCLA. I wish you the best of luck.

TLDR: do not take this class

Grade Breakdown:
PTL Quizzes (pretty easy 100%): 8%
Mastering Chemistry weekly hw (pretty easy 100% if you put in some effort): 4%
CMC (there are 3 and all of them are pretty challenging: class avg was around 60-70%): 9%
CPR (there are 2 and it's pretty easy to get an A if you put in some work): 7%
POGIL (group-based worksheets): 8%
Participation (need to attend 2/3 of lecture): 3%
Survey (3 MANDATORY SURVEY): 1%
2 Midterms: 30%
Final: 30%

As you can see, you are self-studying and finishing so many assignments that takes HOURS to complete just for assessments to be almost 70% of your grade. If you do not like to self study please do not take this class because Professor Courey frequently skips slides because he expects you to already know the material beforehand. If you want to get a decent grade, you have to put in so much work into the class. Even though I got an A in this class, I was spending more time with this class than my two other major-required stem classes COMBINED. If you want to do well on the midterms and the finals, I suggest you rewatch the entire lectures on 1.5/2x speed because his midterms and final only cover the material he goes over in lectures. On top of that, review all lecture slides, POGILs, PTLs, and do the practice midterms/final. Do not do the LA workshop worksheets if you don't want to waste your time. I didn't do a single one, and I was fine for all the assessments. His midterms and final are easier than the CMCs because most of them are just plug and chug with some tricky T/F or multiple choices that he went over in lectures (again, rewatch the lecture videos!). Also Professor Courey does not offer extra credit, and I don't think he's going to curve the class. If you mess up on one of the midterms/final, it's hard to recover. A lot of students are not happy with this class, and so am I. You are better off with taking 14B because your life will be so much easier.

there’s pros and cons to this class so ill just list them out:

pros:
- all lectures are recorded; there’s clicker questions during lecture however but you only need to complete 70% of them and they’re only based on participation. if you miss them there’s a way to make up those points every week.
- midterms were pretty easy and straightforward and he gives you two hours to complete them. use discussion worksheets, la workshops, lecture slides, and the practice midterms to study for this. there’s also a group portion of the midterm which can help raise your score.
- students were given 1% extra credit for filling out some surveys which really helped in the end
- overall courey is a really caring professor and very helpful during OH and will listen to student concerns if they’re brought up to him

cons:
- midterms had to be taken at a specific time (for us it was 7-9 pm)
- we had 3 prwa assignments (peer review writing assignments) where we basically had to write short essays on a given chemistry topic. writing these wasn’t too terrible but the professor doesn’t grade these your peers do and then you get graded on how well you graded someone else. i personally found these assignments very tedious and time consuming.
- discussion is 2 hours long and if you didn’t complete the discussion worksheet in section you have to meet with your group outside of section to complete it. they were mostly based on concepts we learned in class but some of these were just so long.
- workload for this class is very high compared to lavelles class. we have ptl quizzes that require you to do a bunch of reading review ppts and watch videos before taking them (theyre not timed and you get three attempts on them so they’re not as bad as they sound) i got away with not doing the reading in this class we also have three cmc quizzes that were sometimes difficult because a lot of it consisted of true/false questions

content wise the course is definitely difficult especially if you hate thermodynamics like I did. but courey did a really good job at doing the best he could at helping us understand the material and providing a lot of resources to study. The final did screw me over very badly but he did end up curving it and curved the class slightly at the end so it ended up working out.
This class is definitely a lot more work than lavelles class but I do think courey is a lot more lenient with grading and less weight is put on our assessments but do not take this class just because you think it’ll be easier because it was definitely not easy will guarantee make you cry once a week.

For a lack of better words..... this class was a hot mess. Given that it was a pilot class, I went in expecting a lot of accommodation and preparation for learning -- but that was certainly not the case at all. My TA was wonderful and super responsive so he was great. I genuinely hated coming to this class' lectures. It consisted of CMC quizzes, Two midterms, POGIL group worksheets, PTL quizzes, Homework, Peer Review Assignments and other small assignments alongside the final. I found the professor to be very elitist and non-accommodating on a personal basis. The CMC quizzes were SO hard. Midterms were pretty doable, and I did fairly decent. The final however, in the words of Rap Queen Nicki Minaj, was "yikes". Genuinely, that final traumatized me. Albert was not very responsive to student concerns, although he did end up curving the class because like 90% dropped letter grades due to the final. This class sounds so nice on paper, but at times I felt like I was at a funeral for my GPA. Prof skips slides a lot and just like expects us to know material on them??? HUH??? The LA workshops were so different from Chem 14AE and threw me off so hard, we would just sit there and review things instead of finishing up worksheets together and learning. I definitely hope the chem department either just discards this chem series or reforms it to make it actually beneficial to students and the same level of difficulty as 14B -- it is not supposed to be 5x harder. The POGILs became longer and longer each week, and one time my group spent 5 hours AFTER 2 hour discussion to finish it. I will give Dr. Courey credit where credit is due, however, as he will try to be somewhat just about assignment deadlines and he is an intelligent guy. We are living through a pandemic -- it is extremely unfortunate that we did not get more support and accommodation. I would genuinely not recommend this class to anyone, it made me reconsider a career in anything remotely-science related.

I disagree with the other negative reviews of Courey. For me this class was harder than 14AE and perhaps Dr. Casey set too high a bar for us AE students. But Courey is still miles above many other chem profs like Scerri. He is very helpful in office hours and stayed behind every class to answer questions. He's a super smart guy (went to Harvard!) and his answers to questions were always very clear and math-based/logical. I found his exams to be wayyyy easier than the practice LA workshops/practice tests that he gives. I think they were very reasonable and able to be finished in 2/3 of the time alloted- he overprepared us with the pretty difficult past worksheets. He was very communicative and sent many emails with updates, and very accomodating too- he extended CPR deadlines, dropped our lowest HW grade, and extended deadlines for other homeworks. Honestly the only negative part about this class was the CMC quizzes, which were extremely difficult with very low averages- but this was replaced with our final exam grade (another accomodation from Courey).
Now I'm not saying this class is easy- it's not, especially because I've never taken chemistry in high school and 14AE was my first chem class. I also had 3 other classes to juggle. But I was still able to do well because 1. the hw is very BS-able (I didn't do like half of them because they weren't worth much) and 2. the textbook SAVED me with the concepts + watching his lectures on 2x speed. (also TA Mariah was a godsend.)
All in all Courey is a much better prof than others are making him out to be. The tests were really fair (length-wise and content-wise) and he is very accomodating for a STEM professor.

A lot of people are leaving harsh reviews based on the intensity of the final, so I'm gonna give a non-biased review of the course.

Courey is a fairly good professor. He explains the concepts pretty well and his slides have a lot of content (the textbook reading isn't necessary because of this). However, he often will skip/quickly go over slides that have important info, so make sure you review all the slides from the lectures and ask questions if you don't understand. Courey always does his best to answer student questions during office hours (he usually goes overtime if there are more questions) and hosts additional office hours for Q&A sessions about the exams/written assignments. Also, sometimes we got a little behind in schedule, which made it difficult to understand the pre-lecture assignments (we were doing pre-lecture assignments for future lessons without even finishing the current ones). Nevertheless, it was still manageable. This was the first time 14BE has been offered, so I think there will be improvement in the future.

The workload is genuinely not bad. The "enhanced" part of this course was to provide students extra opportunities to understand the material, and that is exactly what all of the assignments do. Yes some are time consuming, but for someone with no chemistry background before college, having structured activities were really helpful to assist me in understanding the material. Also, the PRWAs are not as bad as people make them out to be: the first one was like 3 simple questions (explanation/calculation), the second was a 250 word paragraph explanation of a concept, and the third was a 500 word essay that was BASED ON a biochem concept, but we were only asked to explain it relative to the content we learned in class and all the necessary information to understand it was provided.

The midterms were relatively easy. My TA told us that Courey specifically made the final harder because of the easiness of the midterms. Once again, cut him some slack; it's the first time this course has ever been done and he made accommodations once he saw how people performed. He made it out of 88 points instead of 100 and changed the grade breakdown so that a 91%+ was an A and an 88-90% (I think) was considered and A-. Personsally, I think this was a decently fair curve (still trying not to be biased - I literally got an F on the CCLE portion).

Overall I still would prefer this class over 14B. Courey is a nice professor who wants his students to learn and understand the material. Yes the content in itself is challenging, but I think Courey does a good job at teaching it.