Very humorous professor. Asked us to make Kung pao chicken as extra credit.
善于使用中国成语解释化学模型 比如盲人摸象

This is a review for Yike Zou and Aneta Turlik.

For Fall 2021, the first half of classes was taught by Zou. The other half was taught by Turlik.

CLASS STRUCTURE:
- Midterm 1 (20%)
- Midterm 2 (20%)
- Final Exam (35%)
- Problem Sets (10%)
- BACON (8%)
- Discussion Section (7%)

This class is a lot of studying and memorizing. I believe it's the hardest of the 14 series, and the A cutoff was a 94%. However, getting an A is doable, and an A- is very doable (88%-94%). The problem sets were graded for completion, the BACON is like a bootleg Launchpad (easy 100), and discussion section was graded for attendance.
The tests were fair if you studied for them, and they gave plenty of practice material for preparation. Make sure to complete the practice final and the discussion worksheets because they are pretty close to what you can expect on the test. The average for both midterms was around 75%.

Both professors were excellent in my view. Yike was a great professor. He was very funny, and he made a 9am class feel tolerable to go to. I would totally take this class again with either professor, but if I had to pick one, I would rather go with Turlik. I thought Turlik was the clearer one out of the two because she was more thorough with her explanations of the reaction mechanisms, compared to Yike. The also offered about 8-10 points worth of extra credit, which was very nice.

TLDR: Overall, a great, but challenging class. You can't go wrong with either professor. 25% of your grade is essentially completion.

Great guy, very caring, and understanding of students. He and Turlik gave lots of extra credit and their exams were straightforward.

There is an extremely ridiculous amount of memorizing you have to do for this class. There is no amount of warning that will prepare you for how many reactions and mechanisms you have to know. Zou taught the first half of the quarter and his lectures were not helpful. Instead, I had to learn everything from Khan Academy. Turlik taught the second half of the lectures and she was more helpful. I think I could've done better if I kept up with the problems sets and material as we went. I was very confused during discussion because I didn't keep up with the material, so try your best to stay ahead. A lot of this class is a crazy amount of self-studying and practicing. It is a matter of getting yourself to study chemistry every chance you have, which I was not motivated enough to do.

Honestly the class wasn't too bad for ochem lol. To get straight to the point, the averages for the 2 midterms were 75.5 and 79 if I remember correctly, which are high in general, but are also extremely high for any organic chemisty 2 class. We weren't told the average for the final but about 60% of the class finished w/ an A or A+ for their final grade, which is also crazy for any ochem 2 class. The exams were fair (the TAs said they were really easy in their opinions) and the profs gave a lot of practice and extra credit opportunities. The content for ochem 2 is challenging as is and requires a shitload of memorization, so I don't necessarily think that's the fault of the profs. HOWEVER, many mechanisms weren't really taught or clarified so I had to self-study a LOT of them and students would have to ask outside of lecture for info on content that should've been given already. Another thing to note is that... practice problems sometimes missed necessary info and answer keys sometimes weren't even applicable or correct... which was cause for confusion for everyone, including the LAs and TAs. When checking answers I learned to accept that I was looking at some mistakes or things we didn't even need to know.

A lot of other students had some complaints about Zou's confusing teaching for the first half of the quarter, but you could tell both of the profs wanted to improve and I also felt like people weren't giving as much consideration for things like English being his second language... among others... what I wanna emphasize though is that you could tell the prof tried really hard, and many people will probably say this guy was awful because a new prof in a hard stem class will always have their students trash talking them on the regular bc mob mentality and they're stressed STEM kids w/ the emotional processing of middle schoolers.

tl;dr the class had a lot of confusing things going on considering the profs were new but the lenient testing and grading made it a lot easier. was decent for a brand new prof