Overall, Caram is just an okay professor. He is incredibly smart and absolutely knows what he's talking about, but that ends up not working out so great because he'll zoom over difficult content like it's nothing. He was also very disorganized throughout the quarter, and lectures often went on tangents that weren't exactly helpful information and distracted from the overall content. However, I will say that the POGIL worksheets during discussions were absolute godsends. You will learn so much through this class if you show up, do the work, and even though the midterms and final exam was extremely difficult (esp for an introductory course), you will come out of this class knowing so much more than the 14a classes.

If you haven't taken AP Chem in high school (or simply don't feel the most confident in chemistry), I would highly recommend that you take the 14AE/BE series as opposed to regular 14A/B. There are systems in place in this class to help to succeed, such as:
- 50% of your grade essentially being free (HW assignments/Canvas quizzes you can infinitely re-take + discussion worksheets with corrections)
- plenty of office hour opportunities with TAs (godbless Arthur and Belle)
- practice midterms/final (sometimes not the most reflective of the actual exams, but helpful nonetheless)
- 5 in-person quizzes only weighted at 1% each with your lowest score being dropped
- 2 hour discussions with group work (yes, I know it's long, but these really helped reinforce the material and synthesized lecture material)
- corrections on both midterms for 25% back on points missed

The main thing I liked about this class was the community. From what I've heard, regular 14A seems largely individual (you get in, take notes, get out), while in AE it felt like us students were all working together and genuinely wanted one another to succeed. Dr. Caram himself maybe wasn't the best lecturer, but you can tell he's passionate about the subject and cares about his students.

Overall, I think the class is structured in a way to help out students a bit more, which in my case was very necessary because my high school chemistry background genuinely sucked. That being said, the class had LBLs (learn before lecture), a short quiz due on Mondays, which covered a bit of the content ahead, PDQs (pre-discussion quizzes), short quiz (longer than LBL) due before weekly 2 hr discussion which covered the discussion topic, a weekly discussion packet that you worked on with a group and submitted at the end of class or the beginning of the next one and got the opportunity to resubmit for full credit, weekly HW, about 5 in-class 4 question quizzes, 2 midterms, and 1 final. One of the good things about Caram is that he has a loud voice and doesn't use a mic, so you can hear him clearly and I can say I never dozed off because of his voice. Attendance is required with iClicker, however, I think he gave us quite a bit of absences or some percentage that we needed to get attendance credit. He does give out a very accurate course schedule with accurate readings that pertain to the class contents, they just get tedious as do all textbooks. I think the TAs will make or break your experience, I loved my TA, Arthur was super helpful, and overall super approachable and honest. Some of the cons are that Caram DOES NOT believe in recording classes, which sucked because the PDFs of the class slides are messed up and miss some of the stuff on the slides. When Caram is writing out an example through the projector, it's easy to get lost. He has messy handwriting, and sort of just runs through it not explaining what's going on, which contributed to not knowing how to apply what he was doing. The work in the class isn't too hard and I think is helpful. However, the tests are a bit tough. Overall, the class was okay, absolutely not my favorite.