Professor Hayes is a unique guy. He's nice, understanding, and very knowledgeable, but sometimes he's blunt. A lot of material isn't found in the notes, so definitely show up to lecture. Provides study guides and practice tests. Grade is made up of exams only, textbook was a good supplement but not necessary. Exams seemed very fair to me.

Lectures are not recorded and final grade is based off 2 midterms (20% each) and final exam (60%). Or one midterm can be dropped and the final can count for 70% of your final grade. The first exam was easy, but the second two had low averages. I would avoid this class and prof. if possible.

At the beginning of this class he told us a story about how a kid hucked a loogie on the sidewalk, how nasty that was, and how he told the kid off. After taking this class...I wanna huck a loogie right next to his feet. Material is really really dry, very condescending, fact dumps, and is just really boring.131L is cool and helps the lecture.

Hayes is straightforward about what info he is going to test on. Grade is 20% m1, 20% m2 and 60% final. He lets you drop 1 midterm if it benefits your grade. For 131L- switch to a new TA if you have Kaitlin S. She was outwardly rude to students and made the class environment very uncomfortable. Worst TA i have had at UCSB

Hayes is incredibly condescending during lecture, and writes exams by whim that include information from one slide that is entirely irrelevant to the rest of the course. It is really easy to do sufficiently well in this class, but incredibly difficult to take away any useful information or actually learn anything. Would not take again.

This was so far the easiest MCDB lab I have taken. The exams were all online. Also the experiments were very low stakes, not like O Chem labs where if you really messed up you would miss a bunch of points.