One only takes his class because it is a major requirement. If you come in with a prior foundation of chemistry, with work you can get an A in this class. However, the reason I write such a negative review for him is because he is a terrible professor. His lectures are extremely disorganized, and incredibly hard to follow. He is terrible at communicating. He tells you in his syllabus not to send him emails and to ask questions on the discussion forum. But, here is the thing he doesn't respond to them. Even when you ask him about essential things like the timing of the exam or a confusion with gradescope, he replies so rudely. His syllabus and lectures is unclear and full of typos. He simply doesn't care about you. He is very uppish and highly unprofessional. Serious action needs to be taken against professors like him.

Avoid Scerri at all costs. He doesn't care about you or your education. He lectures at you from disorganized slides and won't effectively answer questions if he doesnt feel it. You just don't learn from him. Oh, you might think, I'll just teach myself then! Well thats fine and dandy until you learn he CURVES DOWN. You literally get punished for teaching yourself. 60% of this class will get a C regardless. If you must take Scerri, try your hardest to get Spencer as a TA. He's the only reason I learned anything.

definitely wouldn't recommend him during COVID. his tests were extensive and way too long for the amount of time we had and the jump in material from the midterm to the final was rough. he's way more into the conceptual part of chem and the test questions were so rough. he also decided not to curve us as much as he planned to this quarter so there's that too. the sapling questions were pretty hard too and not always on topic or helpful for the tests. gonna have to spend a lot of time studying to do well in this class

I would really recommend not taking 14A with Scerri if it can at all be avoided. I noticed several more positive reviews from before UCLA switched to online, so perhaps that format of classes was at fault, but I can't say.

Firstly, grading is only based off of: 30% Midterm, 30% Sapling Homework, 40% Final. After that, he curves the entire class to around a B-average. So, whatever grade you get is in comparison to your fellow students.

The first warning sign should've been when he told us not to expect an A.

From there, he decided, due to the online format, he would make our tests open-note. But to compensate, he both greatly increased the difficulty of the questions (which are primarily short-answer) and gave much less time to answer them. This resulted in an average somewhere in the 60s for our midterm, the vast majority of students not even being able to finish their test due to the time constraint. I noticed several reviews saying that his class could be easy due to the predictable exams, but once COVID happened and he altered the exams in this way, that small positive factor was pretty much out the window.

His lectures themselves were so convoluted, more than half of the students in my lecture just stopped coming. He would have the tendency to assume most of us had a much stronger background in chemistry than we did, and would talk way over our heads. For example, never defining what "antibonding" was and just started using the word in his explanations, leading to rapid questions to the TA from students. His "slides" were also incredibly disorganized. Each individual slide was even slightly different dimensions from the other, with maybe four abbreviations for formulas strewn somewhere on the page in the midst of multiple confusing diagrams that often would require corrections in the middle of class due to incorrect information. You could not figure out any of the content from the slides alone, basically, the best they served was as a somewhat-confusing visual aid. Very disorganized and bad at communicating--I would definitely not recommend taking him if you have fairly minimal chem background.

Other than his fairly-poor lectures, there are barely any other resources for studying for exams. In fact, you often don't even know the names of the topics you're learning in order to find YouTube videos to watch. You don't really know what you're supposed to know.

He told us not to email him, but to use the discussion board instead. However, he rarely, if ever, responded to this board. For instance, I went to post a question about the final in Week 10, and noticed no questions from the week before the midterm had even been answered. Hopefully, those students were able to figure it out.

In all, I'd say--if you come from a strong chem background, you could probably do okay in this class. Since, it's more about relying on the past knowledge you have of the subject and doing better than all the others in the class than actually learning new content. If you come in from a less-strong chemistry foundation, expect to be overwhelmed very quickly and to not actually learn any of the content. It really turned into a competition of who remembered the most about the topics we were learning from their high school chem courses.

Scerri is an awful professor. Students that due well in this class only do so by learning the material outside of class because his lectures make no sense. His exams are somewhat predictable and he often recycles questions from past tests. For my quarter, he distributed past exams questions with INCORRECT answers, and used them on our test. No credit was given for the incorrect answers he gave us so beware. If you are not self-disciplined, this class is difficult because it is a waste of time to go to class and find other resources to learn from. Good luck to anyone who decides to take it with him.

Stay away, by all means, stay away. This man is NOT accommodating during COVID at all. That just tells a lot of how he acts in class. He's rude and notorious for always being like that, his lectures are unclear and he does not like questions. He is the stereotypical horrible professor you think you might get.
The other reviews mention he uses old test questions, which he does. But this quarter he purposefully made his tests way more difficult because he didn't like that most of his students were getting As. He also grades on a backwards curve, which limits how many people get an A.

Just don't take his class.

I would not recommend to take this class with Scerri unless you absolutely have to. The grade is divided 30% for sapling quizzes, 30% for the midterm, and 40% for the final. The class is essentially asynchronous and I ended up watching all of the lectures on 1.5 or 2 speed the next day. The lectures only consisted of him reading through the (already posted) lecture slides but, occasionally, he would add new information or complain about how few people had their cameras on.
There are 5 sapling quizzes, all due at the end of the quarter. The questions come from the textbook and there was some overlap to the class content, but just as much content was never introduced during lecture. I would not recommend reading the textbook or doing the practice problems because there is just too much of a disconnect from the actual, tested class content.
The midterm and the final were excessively long and tedious. If you took AP Chem, the midterm should not be too difficult but towards the end of the course there is a good amount of new material that you will have to study in depth. Thankfully Scerri posted practice tests that were in the same format as both exams which were helpful for studying for the exams. Discussion was not mandatory, but I wish I went more often since the TAs essentially review the material from the past week. You can go to any section so I would recommend asking around to see which TA is the best.

Okay here's the thing.

Scerri is a terrible teacher. His lectures are disorganized and confusing, and he's not exactly eager to help students. HOWEVER . . . his exams are very predictable and easy to study for, and he grades entirely on a curve which really helped me out.

My recommendation? Take this class with him, but don't expect lecture to help you. Watch Professor Dave Explains on Youtube and study off past exams. You'll be fine.

I feel like Dr. Scerri is not given enough credit for the time he invests in his students. To me, it seemed that he answered every relevant question asked of him, and he always made time for students to voice their confusions. Some people complain that he brushes students off & appears condescending, but I think they were just misunderstanding him. He has a good sense of humor & sometimes shows his cats on camera-- he is a nice guy.
While I did struggle with many of the concepts taught in this course, I believe that was a result of my own lack of preparedness for this class. I did not have a strong chemistry foundation coming in, and I was very quickly overwhelmed, but that is to be expected of a college-level chemistry course-- it's gonna take some work to get the grade you want, don't expect it to come easy. If I really tried to concentrate on the material during lecture, I understood it. Dr. Scerri is a clear lecturer if you really listen to him. Although I sometimes found his slides kind of confusing and disorganized, if you asked him to clarify them, he would.
The bottom line is that this class is difficult in that there is a large amount of material you are expected to learn, but you are totally capable of learning it if you're willing to put in the work. Dr. Scerri provides many resources to facilitate student learning, including recorded lectures, lecture slides, practice problems, office hours, and a textbook.

This class was extremely fair, the midterm/final were based off of previous years exams... so literally study those and you will be fine! My only chem experience was Honors Chem from sophomore year and I wouldn't say that was helpful at all. Many of the concepts he goes over in class aren't too hard and there are tons of videos on the internet that will help you understand the concepts more if you need.

Overall, the workload for this class was extremely light and many of the test questions were pulled straight from lecture/previous exams. Scerri himself is not that most helpful or best lecturer, but the TAs were generally helpful. I would highly recommend looking at various TAs worksheets when studying for the exams.