The content before the midterm was relatively easy to pick up especially if you took AP chem in high school. The second half of the course introduced new material that, for me, required a little more work to understand, but it was never unbearable.
The only homework we had was Sapling quizzes, which were basically practice problems that gave you unlimited attempts to complete. Some of the material on the quizzes were not taught in lecture, which was annoying, but Dr. Scerri assured us that we were not responsible for knowing it. Dr. Scerri only tested us on material explicitly mentioned in class, so I found that the best way to prep was to rewatch old lectures.
Dr. Scerri doesn't require attendance, and at the end of the quarter only around 60/235 students actually showed up to the live lecture. After each class, he would stay around for 30min-1hr to answer any questions, so that was really nice. He's really good at clarifying topics, so don't be afraid to ask!
The most intimidating thing about the class was his curve, which only benefitted us because he used at-home testing as a justification for giving us a really difficult midterm. For the curve, he takes sets the mean score as the minimum score for a B+ and then bases the curve around that because he "can't give everyone an A."
If you watch the lectures and study his practice exams, you'll do fine.

Professor Scerri is too smart to be teaching this class. The material makes much more sense once you learn it on your own and then go over it with Scerri. Thankfully, his lectures are recorded, and it isn't necessary to go to your lecture live. He gives out practice tests and problems, which actually help out a lot. The tests are very similar to the practice exams. The TAs are fantastic, and I was able to learn much more from the TA than Scerri because the TA explained it in simpler terms. There are extra quizzes that you take on Thinkwell, but those are pretty easy and give you easy points. The homework isn't mandatory but doing it and reading the textbook help a lot for this class.

I feel that Dr. Scerri often gets a bad reputation, and that may be because some of his jokes are insensitive. I think that that is just his personality, and once you can get past that, he is great professor that knows a lot about the material and is well versed in teaching it to students. His jokes are even funny sometimes. His method of teaching you the concepts of chemistry is more important than any practice problem you could do.

Dr. Scerri was such a great professor. His lectures are very well organized and clear, and he does a lot for his students- he spends an additional thirty minutes after every lecture to answer questions and gives students multiple opportunities to ask questions throughout lecture. He even gives us time to think of questions while reviewing that day's material briefly after lecture. He encourages us that there's no such thing as a dumb question and he really shows that he cares about our learning and wants us to succeed. I found him to be incredibly approachable and very generous when it came to providing resources - he posts multiple practice exams that are almost identical to his actual exams. Additionally, he is really funny and cracks jokes during lecture to make it more enjoyable. I loved this class with Scerri and would definitely take a class with him again.

Professor Scerri is a nice enough guy, and he did actually end up being very accommodating with our final exam, making it optional because of the protests that are happening around the country. He doesn't assign any mandatory homework, and grade is made up of these online, open note quizzes for each unit, on Thinkwell (30%), the midterm (30%), and the final (40%). All of our assignments were open note because of Covid and online classes. My TA, Gail, was awesome, very helpful and better at explaining concepts than Scerri was. My main problem with this class is that Scerri goes over only very basic problem examples in lecture and it is really up to you to self study and teach yourself enough material to do well on the exams. Also a lot of the time he didn't explain new concepts very clearly and especially for the second half of the course I found learning the material difficult. If you're good at being self motivated and teaching yourself, you'll be fine, but personally this was difficult for me and I wouldn't take him again if I could avoid it.

Edit: I TAKE IT BACK. He is not a very nice guy, and only pretended to be accommodating about the final. Based on everything he told us, I should have received an A in the course. I ended up with an A-, after he specifically told us on multiple occasions that he wouldn't curve down. So I guess know, that no matter what he says, he will indeed curve down if he feels like it. I chose not to take the final, and I think he ended up punishing me for it. Those who took the final had that test curved up pretty heavily which helped their class standing and overall grade, which ok, fair, but it seems like those of us who did not take the final are being punished for their success and when emailed about it Scerri basically said yeah I did do that, what are you going to do about it. I guess the answer is nothing, but at least I can rant about his questionable morals and integrity here on Bruinwalk.

Professor Scerri is one of those stereotypical professors in movies. He uses the board more often than not, but he still has slides that go along with what he writes on the board. He uses the board as a way to explain the topics that are on the slides, I think it does the trick.

When it comes to his tests, he really focuses on the previous exams that he gives and going to discussion section. Discussion is mostly the TA just going over previous years exam questions. It is not mandatory to attend discussion. but helpful. Professor Scerri likes to go over the history of chemistry and the scientific discoveries that helped the discovery of the concepts taught in class, so expect easy questions like "What discovery led to the idea of [blank]?" But, once again, refer to past exams (given by the professor) for reference.

Scerri is a great professor IF you have a strong background in chemistry from taking a good AP Chemistry class. I emphasize this point heavily because I know I did well in the class mostly because I was familiar with the content from taking honors and AP chem in high school and didn't rely heavily on Scerri's lectures. I've heard from friends and from reviews that without this background, Scerri can be a difficult person to learn from and his demeanor often makes asking questions in lecture and office hours intimidating. I did find his office hours helpful, and had good experiences with my TA Unal. The most helpful things to do well in this class by far were using the practice tests he posts, using the SAC test bank to look at his old tests, and reviewing his slides. I never bought the textbook and didn't feel like I ever needed to use it once. Overall, I would recommend Scerri as long as you know what you're getting into ahead of time.

Prof Scerris is the best professor I've had so far at UCLA. He is really funny and honestly the people who have bad things to say about them probably didn't put enough work into the class to get a good grade. In this class, you take away exactly what you put in to it. That being said, it is a lot of work, but you will benefit if you put in the effort. The midterm was really easy, just study using his old tests because I had seen and practiced every question on the exam before I went in. The final exam is really tricky though so prepare to study a lot and master the material. DO NOT MISS LECTURE. It is very valuable and the only way to effectively learn the material. Also, the quizzes and homework are easy As so try to do as well as you can on them to boost your grade come finals week. Also, the class is HEAVILY curved so if you have an A in the class based on raw scores you have nothing to worry about come finals. He is also very willing to meet at office hours outside of class and is very helpful and ready to answer any questions. This class is not hard if you do the work and meet with him for any clarification.

Chemistry with Scerri was difficult but doable. DON'T buy the textbook, Scerri doesn't assign anything from it. I never opened the textbook and I got an A+, it's really only necessary if you want a lot of extra practice problems. I came in with a pretty trash chem background, I didn't take AP chem, and my high school chem class was a joke, yet that was fine for this class. I came in worried that my lack of chem experience would make it impossible, and it definitely made it harder, but it wasn't impossible. Scerri is very light on required work, there were only 2 homeworks and 3 online quizzes for the whole quarter, and discussions aren't mandatory (but still go, they were very helpful, at least for my TA). The rest of your grade is exams, which are curved pretty nicely. The thing with this class is that you HAVE to self-study by doing practice problems, past exam questions, and watching khan academy videos (seriously, sometimes nothing will make any sense and you'll have to watch a bunch of videos). Do the practice exams bc he recycles a lot of questions. Scerri's lectures were super fast paced and he would cover things without actually explaining how to do them, hence the need for self-studying. Scerri also expected us to know a LOT of chem coming in so that makes it hard if you don't have a chem background. And half the questions on the exams weren't even chem, they were questions about the history of chemistry. However he and the TA's make it clear which people/experiments are the important ones, and you're never asked to memorize dates or anything like that. Honestly lectures were pretty useless as most of the time I'd just be lost and not understanding what he was doing, but you can make sense of it by looking stuff up and asking your TA a lot of questions. I had Gokberk as my TA and honestly he was the only reason I got an A in this class, he made sense of everything and would give us practice quizzes (ungraded) in discussion section which helped a lot. Pay attention to what Scerri emphasizes in the review sessions (he had an in-class review session for the midterm and all of the classes in week 10 were reserved for review for the final) and study any anomalies with trends, graphs, etc. that he points out in class. Overall, this class wasn't so bad for a chem class, but you need to put in the time to self-study and hope you get a good TA.

Scerri's class if difficult if you are a person that needs to have concepts explained to you thoroughly to understand them - Scerri tends to speed through his lecture posts and does not go into detail about a lot of the topics on his slides that later may show up on exams. However, he posts all of his slides ahead of time, so I recommend copying them down or printing them before class to understand him better. Also, his tests are not that bad once you realize that everything on his tests will come from his slides, so there are no questions that you only would have gotten from Thinkwell or from the textbook (which is not needed, don't buy it). Know all of the material on his slides (even the pages with only a diagram that he barely explains - those diagrams might show up) and do a few past exams that he provides plus some from the test bank and that should be enough to do well on both the midterm and the final.