Prof. Weiss meets every standard for a good professor, except that his lack of organization and dabbling into sophisticated and irrelevant subjects most of the class did not understand made his class a pain in the butt for any non-bio/chem majors.

The workload for this class is A LOT, but Paul and the TA Katie are extremely generous with the grading. Most of your grade isn't dependent on the tests so you can get the lowest score on the midterms and still scrape through with an A like I did.

The class itself is really research-based/heavy, and you become really research literate by the time the 10 weeks are up. Going to Paul's office hours are a must if you want to join a research lab, as he will give out recommendations left and right for the students who took his class.

Don't make the same mistake I did. Take that other professor.

Professor Weiss cares more about student mastery of the material than any other professor I've had. Would definitely recommend to anyone who wants to truly master this courses's curriculum as well as material that was removed from the course.

Professor Weiss has entirely changed 20B from the normal syllabus of the class, he assigns homework and reading from the textbook but after the first month I completely stopped doing the reading because it has NOTHING to do with what you will talk about in lecture or what you will be tested over. His teaching and testing style are the weirdest and worst I have ever encountered, you can definitely tell that he is a researcher and not a professor (he doesn't let you forget it either because he brings up all his published papers and awards and friends who are nobel laureates every five seconds). He's a nice guy, but definitely not used to teaching this large of a class at this level and it shows, I don't think he prepared me very well for 30A and I did not enjoy his class, if you can take someone else, I would highly recommend doing so.

This class was supposed to be titled "Chemical Energetics and Change"
But what actually taught by Weiss were:
x-ray photoemission spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction crystallography, flow cytometry, fluorescent in-situ hybridization, silicone polymers, biopolymers, direct and indirect-band gap semiconductors, semimetals, semi-insulating semiconductors, and so on.

And yes, as you expected, these topics are designed not just for fun - they DiD appear on the exams, which were purely conceptual (no calculators were allowed, by the way, because there were NO questions involving any quantitative calculations). While the topics that were supposed to be in the syllabus - entropy, enthalpy calculations, acid-bases, kinetics, etc. were barely covered during lectures, which appeared to as highly incoherent, disorganized and strangely paced ("flow of consciousness" should be a better term) as a typical episode from Rick and Morty - that is, you never know what's coming up next.

I would recommend Weiss to all kids who are chemo-nerds/maniacs and enjoy bragging hours after hours about nanotechnology. However, if you intend to take chem20B to gain some true, fundamental and organized knowledge of chemistry, Weiss would never be your first choice.