selling both the course reader and problem book for $55. Those two are the must-have in her class. Newsest edition. Call/text me (714) 251-8944 or email me at huypham1230@yahoo.com

153A Textbook for sale

Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry (6th E) (Looseleaf)

Email me: susankim6280@gmail.com and I'll let you bargain for a fair price :D

Sooo I took this professor during session A this summer, and overall, this was not easy. She says on the very first day not to take the summer course, so that's a clue right there...but I had to stay b/c it fit my schedule and nothing else. I commute to school on the bus everyday, and while I was taking this class I worked 20 hours a week at night, so after 4pm Monday-Friday, I could NOT study anything. BUT, I did end up getting an A in the class. So there is hope! I went to lecture every day, and yes her writing on the compendium overhead is kind of annoying but not too horrible, kinda just wasted a few minutes every day, I went to a couple different TA sections during the week, and multiple CLAPS sessions. I didn't buy a textbook, and I memorized the entire compendium...no joke -.- not fun...I wrote and rewrote allllll of the pictures and notes in the compendium, so that when the final was coming, I didn't have to look at the compendium to study, I just used my own notes. Definitely do all of the CLAPS and hw questions, even the ones not assigned, and bring questions to discussions, they help A LOT. The midterms were straight up memorization, so memorize everything :/ but the final was random. I did not end up leaving early, and I almost cried when I came out of the room. I had left some parts blank, and I thought I was gonna get a C...I started to get nervous during the final and began just writing whatever I could remember without thinking into much detail b/c I didn't have enough time, and thank God the memorizing worked and I wrote out everything like a reflex. There were some naming of molecules that came out of the blue, but I had to use knowledge from the chem20/30 series info to help me on those...So again, midterms are memorization (very doable) and final is more conceptual. I never asked her questions so I don't know whether or not she was easy to get a hold of...but pretty much I had to study every day till 4pm, did notes, rewrote notes, memorized EVERYTHING, and came out with a solid A...and it was the summer...Just focus (which I know is hard to do with this kind of class) but you gotta just pump yourself for the class. I also studied with 2 good friends and we studied together every day, sometimes next to each other in the library, but having a solid study group is very helpful. To summarize again, memorize the compendium, have really good and thorough notes, go to multiple discussions and CLAPS sessions, go to class every day, and FOCUS. It was kind of hard for me to focus during the summer b/c a lot of my friends were out having parties, touring abroad and such, and it was easy to just give up, but if I can do it, anyone else can. Trust me. My brain isn't exactly wired to be a genius, I'm not, and I was kind of jealous of the kids in discussions that got everything right away, but you have to work hard. It's not an easy class, but you can still get an A. :] Good luck!

This class was ridiculous. I came into it knowing it would be difficult but also after reading bwalk reviews I got my hopes up about having the quizzes to help my grade a little. Of course on the first day I found out otherwise, that she would not be offering them this summer. So our grade relied on 2 midterms and a final...the midterms were reasonable. Difficult for sure, but reasonable - everything was covered in the compendium. It was just a lot of material. The final, however, was a completely different story...first off, it was INSANELY long and the only reason I was able to "finish" it was because I started guessing at the end due partly to the lack of time but mostly due to difficulty. The questions were absolutely nothing like anything we'd seen before. She had some weird paragraph about aliens missing enzymes that required you to fill in the blanks for some words which was just a time-waster. The material could have been presented differently in order not to be so distracting. Otherwise it was just TOO HARD...as we walked out I heard SO many people saying it was the hardest final they'd ever taken, and wondering if she'd end up curving, which I think she had to, there's no way enough people passed.
Other than the final, she's not the easiest person to get ahold of, it usually takes a few emails to get a response. In terms of lecturing, while in the class I didn't think it was that bad but looking back I agree with other posts on here, she just writes on the screen the whole time and spends way too much time messing with the pen colors etc. Another annoying thing is that some days she shows up on time and starts like a minute early, then other days cruises in 5-6 minutes late which gets really old when you force yourself up in the morning to get to class on time.

Worst lecturer ever. I agree with the other evaluators that she does not deserve the "professor" title. The final exam's style was completely different than her first two midterms, so I'm assuming she was too lazy to make her own final exam and just copied Bates' old exams and reuse it every year. The E-coli question on the final (mention before on bruinwalk) was in this quarter final exam so I'm assuming she's recycling questions... lazy and arrogant. She's a fraud too. I remember in Nelson's first 153a lecture (I later had to drop that class due to schedule conflict), she joked about pleading students not to go inside her office without an appointment because students might walk into Nelson breast feeding her own new born baby... The following quarter... Nakamoto told the exact same joke during our first day of lecture... she is such a tool... unclever, unfunny, and totally unoriginal. She steals Nelson's jokes and Bates' compendium and exams.

"Professor" Nakamoto (I don't know why she calls herself a professor when she has not earned the title) teaches so poorly that I find it hilarious how ridiculous her final was. Perhaps if she did more that just read off the compendium and circle stuff on the scanned pages of the compendium (she's too lazy to even make her own lecture slides, so she puts up scanned pictures of the compendium, which was impossible to read past the first few rows since the text was so small), then I wouldn't be so annoyed.

She claims to not curve the final, and I'm guessing maybe 5-10 people out of the 200 enrolled will get an A on it. Why does she do this? Because she doesn't give a crap about your opinion after course reviews are done with (they were handed out and collected a couple days before the final) since it won't affect her job security (since she is NOT a professor), and she's a sadist.

Also, she thinks she's really funny and cracks all these "I'm-so-clever" comments, such as "I'm a professor at UCLA." No, you're not. You should have gone to law school.

OMG don't take this class with nakamoto!!!!!! She misleads you into thinking the course will be easy and doable because of her fair/easy midterms but then your b**ched slapped with the final!!! She doesn't CURVE!!! She's LAZY and uses someone else's lecture notes and scribbles on it... No joke, she has a laptop pen thing and just flat out scribbles. You can't even read her slide when she's done. There wasn't any quizzes for this summer (most likely because she was to lazy to correct them) so we didn't have them to inflate our grades. Just don't take her class.

At the very least she should curve the final. NO ONE left early. NOT A SINGLE PERSON in a three hour exam. ALSO she INCORRECTLY posted the exam time on her website. Who does that? My friend and I ended up missing 20 minute of exam time.

As far as I could understand, what wasn't from Dr. Bates's course reader wasn't taught in class, and what was taught in class was read and paraphrased from the course reader. Your logical conclusion will become that Stacie Nakamoto is as effective as the course reader. I really don't remember learning anything in lectures. She's one of those teachers that thinks that talking about the material is the same thing as actually teaching it.
The format of the class is extremely easy though. What kind of upper division class gives memorization quizzes worth so much of the final grade percentage??? Anyway, Nakamoto tries to negate this as much as she can it seems by making the final discontinuously challenging. You won't be prepared for it because you'll have figured by that point that the class is very easy (given the quizzes, easy midterms, and overly simplistic lectures).

My personal bent against Nakamoto stems from the fact that one of the TAs had deducted NINE POINTS from a quiz because I had made an obvious error and drew a stable pentavalent carbon (even though it was gone in the next step of the reaction and I had shown a hydrogen being removed in the previous step). I asked Nakamoto about this grading decision, since it was obviously an error and didn't indicate a lack of undertstanding.
She refused. 9 points is half of the 20 points between an A and an A-, which is what I got, probably by about 9 points.

I took this class during summer and I liked it.
Her lecture is really organized and her explanation is so clear and understandable.
Do the problems!!

FYI This class is not curved - she just expands each grade margin by a couple percentages, like an A- starts at an 88. That's not a lot, especially since the final is so hard, but she also basically gives 100 free points (equivalent to one midterm) in really easy, straight memorization quizzes, so that helps a lot.

I would HIGHLY recommend recording her lectures because in addition to having to memorize everything in the compendium, she says everything covered in lecture is fair game. And she talks about random things not in the compendium in lecture and then she tests on them. For example, in addition to the 7 fatty acid structures we had to memorize in the compendium, she mentioned two other ones in class, and then put a 14 point (or something like that) question on one of the FA she mentioned one time in lecture. Do yourself a favor and record the lectures!

Theresa is the best TA. If you don't have her, go to all of her stuff anyways.

The whole quarter I was complaining that I should've taken the other teacher because he at least curved and I thought I was gonna get a C with Nakamoto, but in the end I got an A-. I have no idea how bc I felt like I did really badly on the final, and got B+'s on both the midterms, but I guess they were generous with partial credit on the final and the quizzes helped to inflate my grade too.