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.

Scerri is extremely rude, condescending, and unaccommodating. He should not be a professor for an introductory chem class hundreds of students are required to take for their major.
You'll learn more by not attending his lectures and watching YouTube videos instead (though you will have to attend discussions/skim lecture slides to find out what the topics even are since the syllabus does not explicitly state what we need to know). Scerri can't be bothered to record his own lectures and relies on a TA to do so for him. He will often start a minute or two before lecture is officially supposed to start and go over time after lecture should have ended. He refuses to check the chat during lectures, leaving multiple questions unanswered. Scerri is only passionate about his everyday rants to turn cameras on and when he gets a chance to promote the book he wrote. Even though this is an introductory class, he completely skipped over basic chemistry, forcing us to rely on outside sources to learn how to balance reactions. His lectures are extremely disorganized and consist of words and images on a PDF that have no context or explanations. Scerri reads off these slides, sometimes adding vague information, but his meager explanations do not help clear up new and confusing concepts. He tells us to visualize something new without giving examples or showing pictures and seems to think that just showing us the work for a problem will mean that we understand how to solve it. If you have taken AP Chem, you'll be able to rely on past knowledge for the first few weeks, but after the midterm, concepts that aren't taught in AP Chem begin to be introduced.
Grading scale: 30% Sapling (about 8 or 9 quizzes all due at the end of the quarter but they can get time-consuming since most questions have multiple parts and some questions go more in depth than we are expected to know), 30% midterm, 40% final. This doesn't sound bad until you realize Scerri downcurves. His exams are vague and sometimes even the TAs get confused by what the questions are trying to ask. He expects us to fit an entire explanation on one or two given lines and if we go over the line limit, the graders are instructed to not read it. He expects us to magically know how many reasons we should give for questions and takes points off when we don't have enough, but again, even the TAs don't know what to say to reach the expected number of reasons. Scerri does recycle questions though, so try to do as many old exams as possible, but beware that some answer keys he posts are incorrect and/or incomplete.
If you have to take this class, try to get Spencer as your TA. Even if you don't have him (I had a different TA), Spencer posts his discussion recordings so that anyone can watch them and his discussion slides with practice questions and answers. You can attend his office hours even if you aren't in his discussions and before the midterm and final, Spencer hosted review sessions and answered all the questions we had and clarified concepts.
TLDR: Don't take this class with Scerri. Save yourself.
Scerri is a decent guitar player and he should pursue a career teaching the guitar instead since he was much more passionate when playing the guitar than he ever was during any one of the lectures.

Avoid this man at all costs: like seriously no matter what you have to do don't take chemistry with Scerri. Currently taking 14A and its not even over and it's absolutely terrible. Day 1 I began and on zoom was this old man who did nothing but self promote his work and confuse me beyond belief.
Spoiler Alert: His slides are screenshots from textbooks or random questions online. So they are not cohesive and don't make a ton of sense. He just reads the pictures during lectures. During lecture he does a lot of self-promotion for this book he wrote on the periodic table (1/2 his lectures thus far *its week 6* have included pictures of the book). He hosted a review session for the midterm where he covered 5 weeks of content in 10 minutes, he clicked through the slides so fast you barley had time to read them let alone write anything down. His midterm was on a Sunday, mind you(who does that?), in-which included far too many short answer questions for the allotted time and had an entire 4 part question that was based on fake/made-up chemistry(I really wish I was making this up). His tests have typos, he doesn't explain topics that shouldn't be that hard and causes a lot of confusion. Overall he is one of the worst Professors I have ever had. Every lecture literally makes me more confused. He might be a nice guy but he is definitely one of those people who know what they are talking about so well that forget that we aren't on the same level. Organic Chemistry Tutor is the only reason I even know what the vocabulary words mean and what the equations are for this class. If you have to take him, don't do it. Please save yourself the head-ache and the stress.
-Thank you

I'm usually not someone who is harsh on professors at all, but Scerri is honestly intimidating. Lots of us have bandwidth/connectivity issues, etc, and so we didn't all switch our cameras on, and he always used to blame us for not having them on. Apart from that, he could see-saw from being understanding at times to some students and not at all to other students, so overall everyone was just low-key scared to ask him questions. His lectures are hard to follow and overall caused a lot of confusion, and while the midterm was manageable (I think the average was around an 80 something), the final was rough (many things we did not know showed up and he emailed us in the middle of the test to correct some things -which was definitely distracting). I think our TA said the final average for last quarter was something around a 68%, so be warned. We also had to do Sapling quizzes, which, if you stay on top of it, is quite manageable. However, Sapling did not actually translate to the real exams.

TLDR: Midterms are often recycled, but he makes the final super hard & confusing (as well as too long for the time limit). I would not recommend taking Scerri unless you have to, but if you do, be prepared to do lots of extra studying outside of class to understand the material.

Believe ALL the reviews posted for Scerri, no matter the course, and I know there is a lot. If you are thinking about taking chem 14A, DON'T TAKE IT WITH SCERRI. His class is a mess, disorganized, and not fun at all. During class time (took this class online because of COVID), he just reads off his lecture slides word for word. Often focuses on the history of chemistry instead of actually solving problems. When he does show us problems, he doesn't physically go through the problems with you and because this is an introductory course, it's kind of important that he does. For midterm and final "reviews" he just combines all his slides from past weeks into one big slide and spends the class time reading them word for word, just faster. You're better off not attending lecture, just discussion. (He interrupted multiple lectures by asking why no one had their cameras on instead of focusing on teaching. When we gave reasons (internet connectivity, more cameras on = lagging issues, distractions, etc) he basically dismissed them and said they were stupid and untrue.) Discussions aren't mandatory but they're IMPORTANT if you don't want to listen to Professor Scerri. In discussions, TAs help with actually solving problems and what they mean in the context of the class. I had Spencer as my TA and he was a GREAT help. Besides 1 midterm during week 5 and the final, there are 9 Sapling quizzes you have to do. He doesn't offer any schedule to do the quizzes, just one big deadline at the beginning of week 10 so you have to create your own or you can choose to save them until the end of the quarter (I don't recommend this though). This class is heavily curved but you'll survive if you learn to work well with your peers and ask for help. Join a PLF session and talk with your peers on help with sapling quizzes. Class only consists of 3 grades: Sapling, Midterm, and Final. Our midterm was very easy with almost all questions copied word for word from another exam in previous years but for the final, it was devastating so don't think that you can float on by in this class.

tldr: This class is messy from start to finish. Don't go to lecture; go to discussions. Try to get Spencer as your TA. Sapling is required and try to finish one quiz a week to be on track. Midterm is easy but final was excruciatingly hard. Class is curved. Get help from PLF sessions. Grade consists of: sapling, midterm, and final. If you're in this class, you can text ********** for pdfs of past midterms and finals with answers (as well as blank ones so you can practice with).