Professor

Eric Scerri

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Easiness 2.5/ 5
Clarity 2.7/ 5
Workload 3.2/ 5
Helpfulness 2.5/ 5
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2020 - This man in a menace to society. He is by far the worst professor I have had at UCLA and anyone that says otherwise is lying. For starters, his lectures are absolutely unbearable. All he does is read his notes off a word document and that is about it. You can ask him questions, but unless you are one of his little pets then expect to get a rude remark back. He is so unengaging that more than 2/3rd of the class decided not to watch his lectures live and just watch the recording. I personally had to watch them in x2 speed because he talks so slow that I could renovate my whole room before he reaches to any meaningful part of the lecture. Now lets go into the course content ( spoiler alert: it's not any better). Okay first and foremost, he makes all the students buy a subscription to Thinkwell. "But surely he has a good reason to do so" you might say, well you would be wrong. All that anyone does with thinkwell is take the four quizzess he assigns, which is something he could just do on CCLE, but no he would rather lock our grades away behind a paywall. If you genuinely want to learn anything in this class, I recommend you get a PLF because Scerri will not be helpful. Let us move on his despicable tests. He has the midterm and final, but I can tell you that no matter how long you study for them, you will still be unprepared. Oh and even you do somehow manage to understand his tests, well good luck even finishing them. He is so intent with making sure student's don't cheat that each question is subdivided into the whole alphabet. So prepared to take on question 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 1e, 1f,... you get the idea, and no just because its subdivided does not mean it is any easier. And while it may sound good on paper, for those of us that cannot write or process almost instantaneously, we end up having to suffer because we now have to submit our test with multiple sections left unanswered. Do not even bother trying to talk to him about it because you will get no sympathy from him. If you want to know how he interacts with students, I'll give you a little anecdote: on week 10 a girl asked him if the review session he was going to have would be recorded. And what did he do? He (very obviously) rolled his eyes and said yes, and then proceeded to interrogate her on why she would not be able to make it to the live viewing. Mind you this was in front of many other students, and even recorded. When I was watching it, I had to replay it because I was in disbelief that he would dare roll his eyes at a student. He has a huge ego and it was apparent since day 1. As a professor, he is horrible, but as a person, he is despicable. So, do not listen to these positive reviews on bruinwalk because I have a sneaking suspicion some are TAs trying to get students to take his class. IF YOU CAN AVOID THIS PROFESSOR, DO SO AT ALL COSTS. Trust me, it is NOT worth it. If you happen to have the misfortune of having him please enroll in a PLF or watch youtube videos on the topics instead because I assure you that you will learn more that way.
Easiness 2.7/ 5
Clarity 3.0/ 5
Workload 3.7/ 5
Helpfulness 3.0/ 5
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2024 - I'm also in the pool of people who think Scerri isn't that bad. I feel like he's nicer than what the reviews say, but again I think it's mostly personal preference. He was (surprisingly?) understanding around midterm times and offered to give us a "no-harm" midterm where we could choose to take the midterm, and if we do better on the final then our final grade will replace our midterm grade (or if we did worse then at least we had the midterm boost). Unfortunately school got moved online too much and Scerri was afraid of online cheating, so he canceled the midterm. Our grade breakdown should have been 30% achieve, 30% midterm, and 40% final, but he changed it to 50% achieve and 50% final. Here I'll just say what worked for me in this class. I walked in afraid just like everyone else. I think the fear of doing badly really pushed me to study more. Usually I don't take notes (bad habit, don't follow me), but in Scerri's class I watched every single lecture 1-2 times and took notes on almost everything in the slides and what he said. I admit---I fell two weeks behind on lecture (once in the first half of the quarter and once in the second half :| ), but I still watched those lectures and caught up with everything before I went to class in person again. Scerri changed his exam structure starting this school year, and I panicked a lot because everyone says he used to reuse his exams and now I had nothing much to practice with. Scerri did post his past midterms and finals from 2016-2018, which I thought were good practice but I would have preferred more multiple choice questions because our midterm and final was completely multiple choice. I didn't have any extra practice material on top of that. I didn't go to discussion sections after the first week because I didn't like my TA and got too lazy to go to other ones... but I'm sure the TAs are good resources if you need extra help. I did go to one of Scerri's office hours and he's pretty fun! Do you know he has two cats? Scerri's final had a lot of math problems, which was fortunate for me because I understand equations and calculations more than conceptual problems. He's also nicer to the 14 series than to the 20 series, so don't worry too much :) tl;dr: I personally don't think Scerri was that bad. Go to lecture, take notes on everything, understand everything, practice with past questions, understand chem in a mathy way (know how to do calculations!), go ask for help if needed. Good luck, you got this!
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Overall Rating 2.9
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