Want to spend your nights trying to teach yourself your entire course with a professor who is uncommunicative and unhelpful in every aspect? Do you like non-stimulating slow lectures that don't have 2x speed and have absolutely no direction for any info needed to learn/do well in the class? Take Russell. She has all that & more. Her TAs are kept in the dark and have no idea what she wants (even though these TAs are trying their best), she has an unorganized website that is unnavigable, and her final exam and midterm answer key practice tests are wrong and she doesn't reply to emails, and she uses this class as an opportunity to promote her lab manual from 1992. $53.67? I think not. So how is she still employed, you ask? She's tenured.

This class should be reclassified as a 7 unit course because hell it takes more of your time both in and out of the class than what a 6 unit class even takes. Either way, taking 14BL with Russell has been an interesting ride. So I'm gonna systematically dissect her class with categories.

NOTE: She does NOT give any extra credit on any of the assignments/exams however, she does grade on a strange scale (there are practically no +/- grades but rather just the letter itself). The class is out of 300 points (although not stated in the syllabus, I've done my duty and added up the total points of all assignments).

1) Exams:
She had 3 different sets of midterms (all completely different) between the lectures and they tested completely different concepts (even though technically, it was all fair game). The difficulty between each set varied widely and thus grading was not consistent between lectures even though she considers the whole BL class as 'one'. For Fall 2020, the class median was 28-29/35 (dependent on the lecture).
With respect to the final exam, it was arguably easier than the midterm which contradicts what previous quarters have stated - this may be due to the difficulty of the midterm itself where she wanted to balance it all out. However, the final was out of 65
This category is out of 100 points, making it such that 33% of your grade was based on exams.

2) Labs
Labs were allocated 2-3 hours but in general, it took around 1 hour with the online format. This is only considering the synchronous portion. HOWEVER, many lab activities assigned are hella tedious and took 7-8 to complete; she even made some teamwork which is a major hit or miss, and most of the time you're forced to complete an assignment made for 2-3 people on your own. By far this category makes up the bulk of your grade so make sure you don't lose a lot of points from avoidable errors!

3) CPR
Kinda like 23L peer reviews but it takes a lot less work. This category is worth only 24 points (out of 300) and there are 3 CPR assignments due throughout the quarter. With respect to the text-submission stage, you have a template so you more or less copy and paste and determine which steps are incorrectly and correctly done. When it comes to the review, you go through a calibration stage and then you review 3 other peers' work (not including your own). So total, there are 6 texts you have to review but it generally takes around 1-1.5 hours to finish all of them so it's not as much.

4) Lectures
Ah, the lectures. It is a god-send that Russell does not make us attend her classes live otherwise I will actually be bored out of my mind. She talks VERY VERY VERY slow and with the whole online format, she sounds normal at around 2.5-3x speed (so keep this in mind when going thru her lectures!). She doesn't really cover a lot of concepts in-depth but rather superficially goes through them so unless you have a good background of acids and bases and the concepts learned in 14B, it will be tough trying to follow along. I recommend just going over concepts learned in 14B/find presentation slides from other professors who taught this class.

5) Communication
She tries her best to communicate with the class and sends weekly emails to tell us what assignments are due which is very considerate and nice of her. However, I will be focusing on Piazza. Her responses in Piazza are very hit-or-miss. She sometimes will answer the question (but rarely!) however most of the time she fails to answer what people are asking. She tends to go around and beat about the bush, so if you are going to ask her questions, please make it as explicit as possible. Note that most people will ask questions that are deemed ('redundant', 'not needed') so that might be the reason why she does sometimes give a half-assed answer but who knows?!

6) Grading
It takes her 3-4 weeks after the assignment is due to release grades out on gradescope, yet she tests us on these concepts on her exams. It's indeed quite contradictory; like how is one supposed to know where they can improve on in the labs yet you still test them on the same things during the exams - did we do it right? or not? who knows! Either way, it is a combination of TAs grading and her releasing the scores that cause major delays which really annoys people who are trying to know where they stand and where they can improve on before taking her dreaded exams.

If you've gotten to this point, I commend you for making it this far. As a prize, I will state that if you have the chance to take a professor like Pang or Casey then do it. It will save you SO MUCH blood, sweat, and tears (or anger), and especially in a class known to be tedious, it would make your life much easier to take a professor who actually communicates with their students and explains concepts well.

Overall this class is a pretty challenging class (mostly depending on TA) partially because there is a lot of work including pre-labs, labs, post-labs, and studying for the exams but it ended up being...doable. Some TAs grade harder than others for labs. Prof. Russel's lectures were not very helpful because she often went through material too quickly and not in-depth enough nor were her slides very helpful. Thankfully lecture is not required. I recommend looking at Dr. Casey's slides which walk you through the practice problems. For exams, the practice exams are pretty helpful and I would try to master all the concepts there and practice the calculations. The exams in this class are very math-based and I would try to get my hands on as many practice problems as possible.

This was the first lab I took at UCLA and at first it was a little hard to get the gist of it since it's not like a regular lecture class. After the first two weeks, I think you can start getting the hang of the wok you need to do. Professor Russell is a nice person, but she's a horrible professor and lecturer. She's boring and confusing both in lecture and in office hours.

The class is too much work for only 3 units. I had an easy TA so that was pretty nice since a big part of your grade are the labs and pre-labs, and I heard horror story of harsh TA's graders. The midterm was pretty simple, but the final... I studied so so much and the conceptual questions killed me. I did not know what they wanted. They would ask, "what inferences is the student making for this graph?" It also sucks because the final can make you or break. If you do well on it than you can pretty much get an A, but if you do bad, and by that I mean get a B on it, then that's pretty much your grade since it's worth so much points.

I ended up getting a B? Which I actually have to check if my points add up because I actually was not expecting that. I didn't do too well on the final but I did well on everything else so I thought my labs would make up for it. Also, you do group labs, which I did not like because my partners did not want to meet up, they just split the questions, so I didn't get to learn the rest of the material and concepts needed for the lab.

It feels like an easy class as you take it because it's just tedious work. Try to focus on both calculations, concepts, and lab procedures for the final though. I would recommend going to as many office hours as possible. Looking back it was a doable class, but of course it's easy to say that after you're done with the course.

Taking Chem 14BL was definitely stressful at first. You really need to keep up with the pre-lab/post-labs and do well on them! If your TA is a hard grader, don't worry because the rest of the discussions will be weighted to make up for easier/harder TA's. Her lectures are really useless. I went on Facebook the entire time during her lectures and I would procrastinate doing her optional problem sets until the midterm/final. Make sure you do the optional problem sets and really understand what is going on! I was not prepared for the midterm but somehow got an 80 (avg was like a 65). The optional problem sets will help you during your midterm/final and make sure you understand the pre-lab/post-lab questions. She lets you bring a cheat sheet to both the midterm and the final which is nice. She also offers extra credit (explaining a reaction- best 20 responses get a couple of EC points). The final wasn't bad at all in my opinion and at the end of the final she gave up to 10 points EC if you could explain some concepts that you should've learned during labs. I pulled through with an A in her class (did well on the labs) but I have no clue what I got on my final since she didn't upload the scores lmao. This class was definitely doable :) Arlene is a sweet lady.

Arlene is ok. She's not the best at explaining things. Midterm exam is always a time crunch (50 minutes if you start on time), but the final is better in terms of time. I studied for maybe half an hour for the midterm and still scored almost 10 points above average, so the class isn't that hard.

All of that aside, Chem 14BL in general is just trash. No other way to put it. Labs are a drag, but always finish early (this is the single only redeeming quality). You can cut corners in lab with little to no consequences because the quality of your data just needs to be good enough to roughly be what the experiments call for.

Actually, chem classes in general suck, so nothing new to see here in 14BL.

The exams can be challenging

This was by far the worst class I have ever taken at UCLA. I have never written a review for anything but this class caused so much trouble for me I hope to encourages others to not take it with this professor. The TA did not come to lab then would grade very hard and the professor was unhelpful.

Honestly, I did not put as much time into this class as I should have, but for the amount of units given, this class is a lot of work. I'll be going through a few things about the class itself with Professor Russell.

Professor Russell uploads weekly lecture videos, which are often slow and time-consuming to get through.

I felt like I learnt more from my TA going through some material that's related to lab activities.

Answer keys to practice problems were sometimes wrong, which absolutely sucks if lecture material gets confusing.

What I hated the most was getting assigned group work in post-lab reports. I had a 3-person post-lab report and I basically did 2/3rds of it because there was nothing to enforce work being split evenly. It absolutely sucked that I had to stay up, lose sleep, and pick up other people's slack in the middle of the week because I'm forced to do group work.

Take my review with a grain of salt - this was my first B, so my tips and opinions are probably biased.

This class was just so so bad for me. Not for everyone, though, so don't worry.

Things I did that you SHOULD NOT DO if taking this class:
I didn't spend nearly enough time studying for the exams (started 1-2 days before the exam and nothing made sense). I also never went to live problem solving stuff sessions (they were at 8am!!). I also didn't do the practice problems until I started studying. I also didn't ask any questions no Campuswire, because I only looked at it when I started studying. Moral of the story: don't fall behind! Review everything at the end of each week and ask questions on Campuswire or in the sessions so you stay on track.

The only concepts that lined up with 14B were rate law and acid-base. I would recommend that you DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS ALONGSIDE 14B. There is no point, and it would be better if you were familiar with the concepts before coming into class.

Russell did recorded lectures only, which were painfully slow and boring to watch, AND we never got to interact with her. I understand that she is a busy person and that probably contributed.

Labs were usually just data analysis stuff, pretty straight forward. Group projects are always a pain, but it helped to divide the workload because the lab reports were kinda long.

We also evaluated videos of experimenters using volumetric pipettes, burets, and other equipment. This wasn't hard at all, but it was definitely boring.

Exams were okay. They seem very simple until you get one back and realize you don't know how to do sig figs, and that units and sig figs are what cost you your grade. :((

Overall, Professor Russell is a bit of a traditional educator that lectures and uses all of the fancy terminology, but it's hard to connect concepts. I would take this class again, and probably take it with less classes so I can focus on everything going on.