For approximately five and a half weeks I was not sure whether the small German man lecturing me at 2x speed through my computer was real or not. Never actually having seen this man, I assumed the person identified to me as "Dr. Gaston M.U. Pflügl" was long dead, or simply had never existed at all. Then, at approximately 1:14 pm on a Friday afternoon, I received a chillingly haunting email from the small German man trapped inside my computer. This so called "Dr. Pflügl" had sent me an email reprimanding me for an "unwarranted and rude" comment I had made on the CCLE discussion forum that "affect other student". The email, riddle with a thick German accent and a fair number of typos , confirmed my worst fear: that the tiny man in my computer was indeed real, and was perhaps living at 2x, 1.75x, or even 1x speed. This revelation kept me up a number of nights; I was utterly perplexed as to how his existence could be. After approximately three and a half nights of pondering, I came to the thrilling conclusion that "Dr. Gaston M.U. Pflügl" was not living, or dead, or even human; he was, in fact, a digital demonic entity... how else could this man be immortalized at 2x speed? The TAs and LAs had sold their souls to Pflügl, turning wicked into wicked beasts that forced their students to attend 3-hour laboratory sessions that would take a mere mortal approximately half an hour to complete. Now, I can say I have escaped Pflügl's wrath in pursuit of that holy letter which I have not seen in years: yes, like many other poor souls before me, I have obtained the mystical "A-", but at what cost?

As others have pointed out, the CPR assignments now have reflections that can boost your text score up to 100% so it is much easier to get an A now than it was in the past. So don't dwell on those old reviews. If you procrastinate this class can pile up and it will negatively affect your grade, however, if you just skim the lab manual and watch his lectures (on x2 if you are low on time) and study your post-lab quizzes then the whole class along with the final should go smoothly. He is an amazing and very helpful professor so do not be worried about this class.
The class is made up of 500pts.
25pts for online pre-lab quizzes
40pts for in lab paper quizzes
10pts for online post-lab quizzes
150pts for Lab worksheets
30pts for the first writing
50pts for the second writing
80pts for the final writing
15pts for a few different participation items
100pts for the final
You are allowed to miss 1 lab (lab worksheet, pre-lab, in-lab and post-lab quiz) and still receive full credit, however, if you don't miss he will replace your lowest grade in each of those categories with full credit,
Good luck fellow bruins!

As others have pointed out, the CPR assignments now have reflections that can boost your text score up to 100% so it is much easier to get an A now than it was in the past. If you're reading this you will be taking it anyway with Pfluegl so ratings are a bit inconsequential, but just know not to be scared of the old reviews talking about the CPR score!

This class should be an easy A with the adjustments that Dr. Pfluegl has made. For one, he drops the lowest grade in all sections of the class (pre-lab, in-lab, post-lab quizzes, as well as lab worksheets.) Secondly, the lab worksheets are relatively easy and do not really require prior knowledge of the material. As long as you follow the lab manual, you should be good to go. Moreover, pre-lab, in-lab and post-lab quizzes can be found online.
A big component of the class is the CPR assignments. There are 3 CPR assignments on the labs done in class. One of them calls for students to write the first half of a research paper, the second one has to do with the second half while the third one is a full research paper. A big part of CPR assignments is peer review. Even with an average text grade, a perfect peer review grade can really bring up the assignment score. The professor does offer extra credit that increases text rating by 5 points (out of 10). So, if you get anything above a 5 as a text rating, your score can be boosted up to full points.
The final exam is pretty easy and you can score well just by reading through the lab manual once or twice before taking the exam.

At least while it was online, this has been the easiest class I have taken so far at UCLA. If you do the bare minimum you are guaranteed an A. The writing can be annoying but just follow the templates and you can earn full points with the reflection assignment they give. Most people only needed a 65% on the final to get an A.

If you're reading this, you probably have to take this course anyways to fulfill some sort of major requirement. So I'll just tell you about what to prepare for and watch out for.

Workload and material: The entire course is structured like a wannabe CHEM 20L/14BL. That means the work isn't difficult nor challenging, but it is fairly tedious. The lectures aren't long (usually about 30 minutes) and are online. They give background information about the topic you'll be covering in your lab section for the week. CPR is a huge pain in the arse, I'll touch up on that later.

Grade: Your grade comes from a pre-lab, an in-lab, and a post-lab quiz each week. All of them are really easy but the questions are randomly selected from a question pool. The in-lab quizzes just re-use the same question pool as the pre-lab quizzes, so I suggest you find a friend to take this course with you and review each others' pre-lab quizzes so you can have a better idea of what the question pool for the week is like. Using a friend, you could very easily cheese all the in-lab quizzes. You don't need to be in the same lab section - your labmates are randomly pulled every week anyways - but getting a second opinion on your CPR essay before submitting and having a greater view of the problem pool for the week will be a huge help. CPR is a huge pain in the arse in grading, I'll touch up on that later.

Clarity and Helpfulness: Since the materials covered in this course are easy, you probably won't have much, if any, issue with clarity. In fact, there is a good chance that you probably won't even learn anything new/useful. Helpfulness is an issue, however. Dr. Pfluegl continuously claims in his online lectures and in emails and announcements that he is willing to meet up with students to discuss any issues that the student may have. This could not be further from the truth. If you do plan to meet up with him or to contact him through email, expect him to parrot exactly what the syllabus says, and expect him to never budge from the syllabus. In other words, meeting up with him is entirely and utterly useless. This course might as well have been curated by a bot that responds with canned responses and I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. This would not generally be an issue, except for the CPR (starting to see the pattern here?). Again, I'll touch on that later.

Midterms and Finals: There are no midterms (hallelujah!), but there is a final. The final is taken in a computer lab, and there are a whole bunch of sections at a multitude of times throughout the entire finals week that you can apply for. You really don't need to worry about schedule conflicts.

CPR: This is the real elephant in the room. I will not lie, CPR is a huge pain, and this is probably the one and only significant bottleneck for this course. For those lucky enough to not have to use it in other classes, CPR is a UCLA-based online essay submission/peer review website. Each CPR assignment has 3 parts: text entry, calibrations, and peer review/self review. Each of the 3 CPR assignments you will have in this course have a very high weight on your final course grade, so make sure you don't screw up on these. Your grade for the CPR assignments is 30% from your text entry, 30% from calibrations, and 40% from peer review/self review. However, you cannot complete the rest of the assignment without having first submitted a text entry, so make sure that you SUBMIT A TEXT.

For the text entry, this course requires you to write a research paper. The first assignment expects you to write one half of a research paper, the second one requires you to write the other half of a research paper, and the third one requires you to write an entire paper. Expect to sink a lot of time into the text entry section. Note that since your grade for the text entry section is peer-graded, so expect your classmates to grade your text harshly (yay competition). This isn't helped by the fact that your grade for this section is based on a straight scale, so writing a mediocre (5 out of 10) essay will literally net you 50% of the text entry grade. Asking Pfluegl to regrade because your classmates have been too harsh will get you a standard canned response to the effect of "We agree with your classmates. You get your grade," so you'd probably only benefit if the quality is very noticeably higher than what your classmates rated you, enough that even a bot can notice it.

Calibrations aren't too bad. You rate 3 essays that Pfluegl has rated before. If your responses deviated from the answer sheet too much, you get a second try with no penalty. The maximum deviation you can have for your rating is 2 from the rating that the answer sheet has, so you can usually cheese this part by putting 5/10 and, if the answer sheet tells you you're out of range, guess 2/10 or 8/10 based on whether you think the essay was really bad or really good.

Watch out for peer review/self review. In this section you rate 3 of your classmates' papers and then your own. This happens to be the only section that does NOT have a late penalty for (ie if you miss the deadline, congrats, you just lost 40% of your assignment grade.). It does not matter what happened. Heck, your parents could have died, or you could have been kidnapped for the time that the peer review/self review section is opened and Pfluegl still probably won't care enough to even give you a late penalty - standard bot-like canned response to the effect of "Well, you should have taken care of it before the deadline." So MAKE SURE YOU GET THIS PART IN ON TIME. NO MATTER WHAT. Don't rely on the reminders sent out - they're only sent out a couple hours before the deadline (great reminder there /s), and depending on your email and CCLE settings, you could very well receive the "reminder" AFTER the deadline has passed. Your rating is allowed to deviate from the average rating by 3, so it's in your best interest to rate your classmates somewhere near average (5 out of 10), even if their essay turns out to be really good, to give yourself the most window of error. You'd screw over the people you're grading, but if it's any consolation, they're doing the same to you.

tl;dr: the course itself isn't too bad, but CPR will most certainly give you a tough time. Pfluegl is a bot.

LS23L is a pretty chill class - the assignments in this class require fairly minimal effort to complete, and having a good TA + LAs this quarter really made the lab experience bearable. For CPR assignments, don't worry too much about writing the perfect paper because you'll get 5 extra credit points per assignment if you complete the writing reflection at the end of each CPR assignment.
The final this quarter (Winter 2020) was made optional due to COVID-19, which was very nice :)

I took this class during Spring 2020 during COVID when classes were all remote. Dr. Pfluegl made everything very very easy. Immediately after the remote learning was announced, he kept us updated with emails assuring us that he was working to create an online curriculum. Although the class itself was a lot of work at times (more work than my 5-unit classes), he provided as many resources as possible. The class was non-synchronous, meaning we had from Tuesday to Sunday each week to turn in all the assignments due that week. On Mondays, he gave us a webinar that went through all the assignments for the week. Plus he uploaded background lectures and other resources for labs and writing assignments. There were three writing assignments throughout the quarter, but they were structured in a way that spread out the work so that students had adequate time to finish them. The lab assignments themselves were honestly tedious and confusing, but midway through the quarter he introduced weekly synchronous TA-led sessions where we could attend if we wanted a TA to guide us through the work, which made a huge difference. At the end of the quarter, in response to the protests and the BLM movement, he made the last lab and the final optional. He truly listened to the students' requests and troubles throughout the quarter and made adjustments accordingly. He was extremely understanding and I highly recommend taking his course. You won't have another professor as accommodating as him.

Coming into this class, I was so apprehensive about CPR (calibrate peer review) assignments, especially after reading all the negative reviews on Bruinwalk and Reddit, but honestly, it wasn't quite as bad as I thought it would be. Sure, I did run into some absolute bull from peers who thought that rating as low as possible would be beneficial to them (which, believe me, it isn't for all parties involved), and the group project had me tearing my hair out, but the CPR assignments have reflections that can boost you up by 5 points each, which is pretty significant, and the group project is only 5 points, which is just 1% of your grade. Open book final and no midterm definitely helped (as of the online version of this course). Don't stress yourself too much, you'll do great if you plan to take this class!

6th Edition lab manual for $25! There is no writing or marking whatsoever. If you are interested, please email me at 6e23lmanualfor25@gmail.com