I'll do my best to give a fair, comprehensive evaluation. Here's a bit of background where I am coming from:
Grade: A.
Bioengineering Major.
Relevant High School Coursework: 5 in AP Chem, a 5 in AP Physics.

That being said, Scerri's class was definitely a challenge but doable.

Class lectures: Overall, Scerri does a decent job teaching. He is a fair teacher, but what throws off many of his students is the fact that his lectures are supremely conceptual, while his tests are primarily computational (of a sort). During lecture he goes over concept over concept but does very little practice problems. That being said, there is so much content being said during lectures, many of which is not in the course reader. In order to have true success in the class, it is not enough just to attend lectures but to take meticulous notes. One detail he might say may be covered verbally but it might be key on the actual exam. Even though he has a course reader, there was stuff covered that he had to use seperate slides (not in the course reader). Though this content seems extra, take it seriously, download it when he sends it in an email, print it out, and put it along with the stuff you want to study. On our final for Fall 2013 he had content he had barely grazed over.

Secondly, do your best to attend lectures. Though he does give podcasts and an excuse not to arrive, sometimes stuff happens to the podcast that makes it cutoff some of the lecture. Other times the camera angle does not capture things he writes on the board.

Studying for Midterms and Exams: Personally, people say to memorize the course reader as if section by section. The best way to prepare for the course is taking the big concepts and linking them all together, filling the holes with the details from his lectures, rather than memorizing them forthright. If you can connect all the concepts together and use each one to memorize another, you will have a much easier time than memorizing them fact by fact. One example of this is how he arranges all the content up to the Midterm. Rather than memorizing each theory up to Schroedinger's equation in preparation for the midterm, it is better to study with the guiding question of "how does all the content that I have learned build up to the prevailing theory of Quantum Mechanics and Schroedinger's Equation?" Arranging the course and the content through a series of large and smaller questions will make the whole course of CHEM 20A cohesive and you will get a better understanding with less studying. Linking concepts of the course rather than memorizing each piece by piece will be beneficial.

In the course reader, Scerri provides a number of practice exams. For a SOLID GRADE in the course, the best thing to do is to know every singe problem in the practice tests. His midterm and final mimic the finals and midterms he gives in the past (shocking, right?). When it comes to doing these problems, it can't be a matter of going through each practice exam once and being done with it. You really must practice the problems that give you the most difficulty if you want to succeed. Another important thing is to try these practice exams at least a couple weeks before the actual final. Start studying week 8 or 9 with these practice finals for a couple reasons: Firstly, he gives a lot of practice exams. Secondly, each practice exam takes at least a 2-3 hours to complete if you are studying correctly. Starting these practice tests the weekend before Finals Week will be utter hell.

Lastly, study with the right people. That is what helped me most in the course. Whatever holes regarding one person has can be easily covered by the other. This will help you immensely in studying the for the midterm, the final and those pesky Thinkwell Quizzes. One note regarding Thinkwell quizzes. Their questions are not nearly as hard as the exam, but do them with friends and you will likely get an A since questions are recycled and you can take the quiz 3 times. Take it all three times even if you do get a 100 for mastery of content. Again, group work will help manipulate the system to your advantage.

Discussion Sections and Office Hours: When it comes to discussion sections, dominate the section with questions. Get these questions from stuff you don't understand from notes, or from the practice exams (another reason why you should be starting these practice exams early). Everyone else will not have questions until weeks 9 to 10, by then it is too late. Take advantage of everyone else's complacency during the early weeks to have all your questions from the practice exam answered. You will be much less stressed. If you are to attend office hours, again be the one to ask questions about content. Likely whatever questions you may have are the same ones others may ask, but if someone else asks the question, there is a possibility of being stuck there for another 10 minutes listening to content you already know.

Misc: Scerri has a decent class. He is a funny professor whose arrogance can come off as amusing and somewhat charming. Get him to play his guitar and you'll be listening to him jam away. Quite impressive really, but we all know he's playing for the ratchets. Be the one to ask the questions and answer the questions. One warning when talking to Scerri however: don't be stupid when talking to him. He ostracized one kid for saying "like" too much. Poor kid. If you have decent grammar skills and aren't too socially awkward (thats for you engineers), then you should be fine in navigating Scerri's sharky waters. Best of luck.

Great class! Loved Professor Scerri. He is so intelligent and very willing to help you at office hours!

Selling textbook and solution manual--$30! Message me at **********!

Okay so coming from a low education background, this was my first REAL chemistry class. And oh my goodness, this professor made me hate chemistry.

I honestly believe that this class is just dependent on how you learn... and I've met people who really like Scerri as a professor. But he just wasn't it for me. Hardly anything stuck and I found it hard to find the correlation between some concepts and what we were talking about last week. Again, might just be me, but I feel like I didn't learn much coming out of this class and was just scraping by.

All in all, easy workload (as long as you don't put it off) and an okay class. Not my vibe though.

Scerri is the worst teacher I've ever had. He's a MESS and very unorganized. During lecture, the only material he uses are powerpoint slides, which are some of the ugliest and longest slides I've ever seen, that have a lot mistakes. Even though he only reads from the slides as his "lecture," he somehow confuses and contradicts himself throughout the lecture (this happened on multiple occasions). When students ask him questions about the content on the slides, all he does is respond by repeating what's on the slide and doesn't actually respond to their question. Also, the practice problems are elementary questions that aren't even close to the difficulty of the exams. In order to learn the material, Khan Academy, the Organic Chemistry tutor, and your TA (if you can get Kevin, GET HIM, literally the best TA.) will be your best friend.

As for exams, they are really LONG (midterm was 6 questions with 3+ parts and the final was 7 questions with 4+ parts). The questions can be really tricky because they aren't like the ones on his slides or on Achieve. The best way to prep for them is to use practice exams because he does recycle questions.

At the beginning of the quarter, Scerri assigns a bunch of Achieve/Sapling quizzes (worth 30% of your grade) that's due at the end of the quarter. Achieve is probably almost as bad as Scerri ngl. The man even said that some of the content covered in Achieve are out of the scope of the course, but of course he still assigns it. Literally the only good thing about Achieve is that there's unlimited attempts.

Finally, the worse thing about Scerri and his class is the way he grades. THIS MAN STILL GRADES ON A BELL CURVE. Like what other professor still grades on a bell curve. It doesn't help him or students, like it's even more work for him to do the math. It also forces us to compete against each other rather than help and feel for one another. Although the curve can help you, it can also SCREW you over like me 🤡. Before adding the curve I had a solid A, but after the curve HE CURVED ME DOWN TO AN A-. Never think your grade is fine in this class.

IF YOU HAVE THE OPTION TO SKIP SCERRI, SKIP SCERRI. TAKE 14B WITH ANOTHER PROFESSOR OR WAIT FOR THE NEXT QUARTER TO TAKE IT. AVOID THE PTSD (POST TRAUMATIC SCERRI DISORDER).

DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS WITH THIS PROFESSOR LIKE THE REVIEW BEFORE ME SAID HE IS QUITE LITERALLY A MENACE TO SOCIETY. First off, Scerri grades on a bell curve. If that did not scare you off then you should know for this quarter, he refused to make the final online, despite the fact that there were not enough TAs left to proctor the exam because of the strike, and he also did not allow us to ask any questions during the final exam. During the actual final he forgot to add multiple equations onto the equations sheet and literally had to add them onto the board mid-final, and also began throwing random questions out, making the final out of 41 questions instead of 45, thereby increasing our chances of receiving a worse score. When asked about final grades, Scerri left a very passive-aggressive email, literally stating that he "very much doubt[s] that there are errors since I have done this work myself rather than leaving it to TAs who don't have as much experience compiling grades" and then proceeded to blame the entire situation on the TA strike. He also managed to lose my friend's final and then proceeded to accuse her of not even taking the exam, despite the fact that there were multiple witnesses of people who saw her turn it in. Scerri is quite possibly the worst professor I have ever taken a class with at this school and is a disappointment to UCLA.

This was my first ever chemistry class and I have left this class absolutely hating chemistry. I read all the reviews beforehand and thought to myself that this class can't be that bad and is probably manageable but I could not be more wrong. Scerri has ZERO organization on his CCLE site and his lectures make absolutely no sense and consist of him jumping from one topic to another back and forth. I did not even know what the topics were so I can study on my own since there is no OUTLINE. The exams were extremely long for the duration and I have not learned one topic in this entire class which will harm me going forward in the course as he is the only professor teaching 14B next quarter too. This class was so bad that I almost dropped and changed to a non-stem major every week. DO NOT EXPECT TO LEARN ANYTHING.

DO NOT TAKE HIS CLASS! HE IS THE WORST! YOU WILL FAIL AND CRY AND SUFFER!

The Chem 14 series is just hard altogether, there is no "easy" professor, especially if you don't know how you learn. With that being said, GOODLUCK. Try new methods, and rely on yourself rather than the professor! I personally liked Scerri for 14A, but don't rely on my review

Said this for 14A too but he's literally not that bad. If anything, he was better for 14B by a large margin. My friends that took 14B with other professors had a way worse time because the exams were harder. At least Scerri's exams are graded with partial credit in mind. He reuses a lot of questions from former exams that he provides which were my main source of studying. He had a lot of in class practice problems that were really similar to exam questions too. Attendance wasn't mandatory but I went to lectures because they were interesting enough and he's a funny and unpredictable guy. Idk I think people just hate him because they don't know how to self-study and they get mad when they don't get an A despite the class having enough resources to succeed if you put in the work. The TAs were great and made so many exam study resources that were posted for the entire class to use.

Do not take this class. This is my second class with this professor and I can officially state that I have retained and understand ZERO information. His slides are so confusing and he runs through 100+ slides in 50 minutes. His lectures consist of him reading off slides and even reading the solutions to practice problems without actually going through the way to get the answer. Chemistry is not supposed to be taught this way! It should be progressive and the professor should work throw the answer, not just read the answer off of two long slides in a few seconds as if anyone would understand that. The TA strike after midterms also meant that there were no sections so any chance of understanding the content outside of his lecture was destroyed and there was zero support given from TAs when it was needed the most. The achieve quizzes are SO long and tedious that it felt like I had numerous final exams for the class. The class is graded in the most confusing way ever that it isn't even possible to know what grade you're at and what the curve is. This is the worst class and professor I've ever encountered.