Does this class suck? Yes. Is it as hard as everyone makes it out to be? No. Felker is not a good lecturer and often lectures on topics irrelevant to the materials tested. For the first midterm, owl and discussion questions are your best friend and can get you a perfect grade. For the second midterm, owl, discussion questions, and book reading/end of chapter problems will prepare you. I was on track for an A+ until I got a D on the final, which to be fair, is my partially my fault, but also the fault of Felker for putting material not covered in lectures, the book, and that the TA's told us specifically was not in the scope of the class. This class will require you to basically learn everything on your own, but the material really isn't terribly difficult, especially if you are good at math. Just make sure to know how to do all the owl and discussion questions.

Honestly people exaggerate so much about Felker. He isn't the best professor but he isn't terrible or even bad compared to professors that are actually bad. A lot of people just complain because the content is difficult, which should be expected as it's a chemistry class at UCLA. However, Professor Felker does go over the content relatively well. I will say though that his tests are essentially all mathematics, which he does not lecture on, so it's important to read the book too. His lectures are helpful for understanding the conceptual part of the chemistry, which is important in interpreting the mathematical questions. Also, he gives multiple opportunities to come to office hours every week and in office hours he has a lot more time to go into greater detail and explanation, since not many people go. A lot of the people who complain about Felker and getting a bad grade almost never went to office hours, so I highly suggest going if you want to do well. Even if you don't have a question just listen to what other people are asking.

I think other reviews here are unfairly harsh. Professor Felker did a decent job of teaching the material. He was incredibly responsive over email (responding within a few hours at most with 600+ students), even though his responses only had a few words. His lectures weren’t great in terms of adequately explaining the material to people unfamiliar with it, but they were useful if you read the textbook chapter before watching the lecture. His midterms and final were very fair and closely matched the more difficult OWL / textbook problems, so there’s little to worry about there if you are succeeding in answering those questions. My advice is this - do many textbook problems before the tests, and read the textbook somewhat thoroughly (especially for the hardest chapters - 4,5,6). The textbook is dense but ultimately is the most helpful thing in the course. Just be prepared to have to teach yourself most of the material - it’s very doable.

Useless professor. He lectured on all the very high level stuff he found interesting, not the material on the exams or anything a Chem 20A student should be learning. The final was brutal, and the mean scores for the 3 versions varied by over 10%. I got this grade from just using the expensive online textbook and remembering AP Chem. If you're able to, use high school credit to skip his class!! Advisors told me to take it, but I don't think I learned anything important that you can't teach yourself from the textbook in a day (same book for 20B). It was clear that he hated this class by his careless emails. LAs often solved questions obviously wrong, but I don't blame them because Felker's practice problems were so unclear.

This class probably won't be online in the future, but he especially failed at that part. Lectures were only recorded instead of being live, as advertised when signing up. He too often screen shared the wrong page (maybe 20% of the time) so you had no idea what he's talking about, and students weren't there to correct him or ask clarifying questions. His lectures averaged over 10 minutes too long, and he released full lectures on university holidays and exam days.

To start, here is the evaluation that I wrote for UCLA of Professor Felker:
"Professor Felker was the worst professor I have ever had. He seems completely uncompassionate of students feelings and is just completely unreasonable. His lectures felt completely useless and he expected you to have background knowledge for the lectures otherwise they were just a waste of your time. He moved at way too fast a pace for anyone to take notes on his lectures and thus lectures would end up taking hours to watch. Additionally, he went way over time with many of the lectures and assigned lectures on days where we had examinations and holidays. The examinations were completely unreasonable. We were asked variations of problem formats we had previously seen but many had crazy twists to them that we couldn't possible solve with the knowledge that we obtained from doing practice problems. I would never take any class with Professor Felker again and I am disappointed that this faculty member has been able to remain working at UCLA. Additionally, Professor Felker is the leader of a Bruin organization that is against many of UCLA's beliefs. The organization doesn't support LGTBQ rights, BIPOC rights, women rights, or human rights. This has made me feel completely untrustworthy of this professor and has made me feel uncomfortable around him. I again would like to highly emphasize that I am completely disappointed in UCLA for allowed this faculty member to remain at UCLA."
To potential future students of this class, do not take him. He is one of the advisors of Bruin Republicans and has Fox news pinned on his computer...I took this class with him during online learning and god this was the worst experience I've ever had with an instructor. If you value mental health and sanity, do not take professor Felker. If he is the only professor available, try to take chem in another quarter or honestly take Chem 20A honors. If it ends up being too hard you can drop but halfway into the class I was looking at the reviews for the Chem 20A honors professor and I honestly wish I had taken honors even if it was going to be harder because its better than the BS that you have to put up with Felker. If you are a freshmen in engineering and this is one of your recommended fall quarter classes and Felker is the only Chem 20A professor, I would say either do honors or start with Physics instead of Chem.

The beginning of the course is pretty much a review of high school chemistry, but don't let that fool you - you'll definitely have to study more after the first midterm because the material gets exponentially more difficult. Professor's lectures aren't great, prerecorded and highly conceptual with very few example questions. I think discussion varies based on your TA but mine wasn't great. Recommend reading the textbook and doing lots of OWL problems/review modules as the tests look most similar to those.

He does not seem like he likes his students. His exams are basically the homework assignments he gives but on steroids, so I recommend just studying up on owls and looking at his past tests from the test banks.

Do not take this class with Felker. I don't care how good you were at high school chemistry. Just for reference I got a 5 in AP Chem and thought it would be fine. No. It wasn't. Even during COVID this man made us suffer even more. Basically what every review has stated is true. If you want to be discouraged about college chemistry in your first quarter at UCLA, take it with him. If not, then I suggest you don't.

Reading the posts from before, it is very sad to say that they are true. I experienced every single one of these moments and it was definitely a fun experience as a freshman chemistry major. So many people switched majors for this class. He has the most monotone voice, reads off of slides that are not useful, and talks in circles sometimes. The only positive is that he was understanding of time zones because of the pandemic and allowed alternative midterm and final exam times. His midterms and finals are similar to owl problems as well (a platform you're going to be doing lots of homework assignments on) Owl saved me so much, it sucks as well but it explains how to do problems after getting it wrong once and we usually got 6 attempts per question. Youtube videos (Organic Chem Tutor mainly) were what saved me and actually got me to learn. I only got a B+ because he curves the class at the end but tbh I never knew what my grade in the class was until the final grading came out.

Just dont take this class. To sum it up, he lectures about the concepts of chem and then expects us to know how to quantum mechanic problem sets without any guidance. Your only resource is the textbook and OWL questions but those are not related to the tests at all. I read the book, watched his lectures, did the homework, did the practice questions, watched youtube videos and still had no idea what to do on tests. I feel really unprepared for 20B.