Honestly, Professor Caram is one of the better professors you can have for 14A. I had Lavelle for 14B and I thought Lavelle was worse by a large margin. Professor Caram can give rather dry lectures and goes through the material quickly but his explanations are fairly intuitive and he is concerned with students learning. His tests are fair. I had him when he first started teaching and the tests were a bit rough especially timing wise and there was sometimes too much material for the allotted time but Professor Caram understood that and handed out about 5% worth of extra credit and still curved the class. Any material on the test was material explicitly covered in class or discussion and there weren't any curveball questions. The bplate office hours were extremely helpful. The homework was on. relevant material and helpful for the tests.

One of the best professors at UCLA, hands down. Caram is a really chill guy who really wants you to excel and just learn the material. Both midterms and the final were extremely fair; Caram does not try to trick you. His lectures were very clear and organized. Caram does give weekly quizzes, and I personally enjoyed them. They kept me from procrastinating and getting behind in material (he also drops the lowest quiz grade). The class is set on an absolute grading scale and nothing is curved, but there was an extra credit question on the first midterm and the final. The worksheets we did in discussion were super helpful in preparing for exams, he spent a lot of time writing the worksheets and they always offered "real-life" examples of what we were learning which was cool.

If you want to excel in this class, highly recommend going to his office hours after lecture and Sunday night at B plate. Probably the only professor that would come to campus from 10 to 11:30 pm to help students. He would sit down and work out problems 1 on 1 and clarified any areas of confusion. Caram is an 11/10 professor for 14a, cannot recommend him enough!!!!

My grade turned out fine, but I had to get a lot of help in order to succeed. I pretty much went to my TA's office hours every week because they actually bothered to break things down step by step. Dr. Caram's office hours aren't very helpful. He explains things exactly how he does in class, so if you don't understand it in class, you're pretty much screwed. His class is not Bruincasted, so if you miss a lecture, that sucks. He goes into more depth than is on his slides, so copying notes from a friend will only get you so far. The weekly quizzes are really easy since they're very similar to the practice quizzes he posts. His midterms and final are more difficult. While they resemble the practice exams posted online, he does create a new question for each of these tests. The most difficult part about this class is that were required to make connections between concepts ourselves. Dr. Caram will not make the connections for you. Often times, these connections are important to be successful on tests. Additionally, there are concepts not emphasized in lecture that end up being a large part. If you put in the work you can be successful in this class.

There is at least one clicker question every lecture, and quizzes every monday.
The discussion groups go over worksheets that are relevant to what is discussed in lecture that week (some harder than others).
As long as you keep up with the ((STRONGLY RECOMMENDED)) textbook problems that he assigns, and don't fall behind, then you should be fine.

As a person, Dr. Caram is very funny and his lectures were often entertaining - though not too much to be distracting from the material.

On the downside, his research into lasers and light waves clearly shows through in tests and worksheets, to the point that I felt like I was taking a physics class at some points. The class is frontloaded with a lot of physics-esque conceptualization, and trails out to easiness toward the end.

TAs do most (if not all) of the grading, so what you get might depend on your TA

Professor Caram is charismatic, engaging, and cares about his students. Everything he covers in lecture is useful information and added with some reading from the textbook before lectures and extra practice from sapling and the textbook problems, you should succeed in this class. He gives practice midterms and finals and they are an EXACT model of what you will see in the real exam. The problems are not ridiculously hard and Professor Caram gives you all the tools you need to succeed. The weekly quizzes also aren't bad, just review a little the night before. I highly recommend taking Chem 14A with professor Caram!

I personally really like Professor Caram as a person. Although his lectures may appear to be randomly ordered with no apparent connection between topics at first, it becomes obvious, later, that Professor Caram puts in a great deal of effort into helping his students understand topics.

The biggest problem my classmates had with Professor Caram was that he would often cover seemingly unrelated topics back to back. What I noticed, though, was that he was really just trying to cover as many linked topics as possible before teaching us what connected them all together. So if you have him just bear with it, it will make sense down the road.

Aside from that I found that Professor Caram's tests were pretty easy as long as you could do stoichiometry. Also, his 200-point grading scale is super clutch.

Overall, Caram is just an okay professor. He is incredibly smart and absolutely knows what he's talking about, but that ends up not working out so great because he'll zoom over difficult content like it's nothing. He was also very disorganized throughout the quarter, and lectures often went on tangents that weren't exactly helpful information and distracted from the overall content. However, I will say that the POGIL worksheets during discussions were absolute godsends. You will learn so much through this class if you show up, do the work, and even though the midterms and final exam was extremely difficult (esp for an introductory course), you will come out of this class knowing so much more than the 14a classes.

Given the subject and the fact that it was his first time teaching this class, I thought it was a solid class. I personally found this class very entertaining. Midterms were take-home and were due on the following day. Problem sets were given weekly, but due dates were pretty flexible. Go to his OH. He was willing to help and clarify anything that was not clear during the lecture and often gave hints for the problem sets.

If you haven't taken AP Chem in high school (or simply don't feel the most confident in chemistry), I would highly recommend that you take the 14AE/BE series as opposed to regular 14A/B. There are systems in place in this class to help to succeed, such as:
- 50% of your grade essentially being free (HW assignments/Canvas quizzes you can infinitely re-take + discussion worksheets with corrections)
- plenty of office hour opportunities with TAs (godbless Arthur and Belle)
- practice midterms/final (sometimes not the most reflective of the actual exams, but helpful nonetheless)
- 5 in-person quizzes only weighted at 1% each with your lowest score being dropped
- 2 hour discussions with group work (yes, I know it's long, but these really helped reinforce the material and synthesized lecture material)
- corrections on both midterms for 25% back on points missed

The main thing I liked about this class was the community. From what I've heard, regular 14A seems largely individual (you get in, take notes, get out), while in AE it felt like us students were all working together and genuinely wanted one another to succeed. Dr. Caram himself maybe wasn't the best lecturer, but you can tell he's passionate about the subject and cares about his students.

Overall, I think the class is structured in a way to help out students a bit more, which in my case was very necessary because my high school chemistry background genuinely sucked. That being said, the class had LBLs (learn before lecture), a short quiz due on Mondays, which covered a bit of the content ahead, PDQs (pre-discussion quizzes), short quiz (longer than LBL) due before weekly 2 hr discussion which covered the discussion topic, a weekly discussion packet that you worked on with a group and submitted at the end of class or the beginning of the next one and got the opportunity to resubmit for full credit, weekly HW, about 5 in-class 4 question quizzes, 2 midterms, and 1 final. One of the good things about Caram is that he has a loud voice and doesn't use a mic, so you can hear him clearly and I can say I never dozed off because of his voice. Attendance is required with iClicker, however, I think he gave us quite a bit of absences or some percentage that we needed to get attendance credit. He does give out a very accurate course schedule with accurate readings that pertain to the class contents, they just get tedious as do all textbooks. I think the TAs will make or break your experience, I loved my TA, Arthur was super helpful, and overall super approachable and honest. Some of the cons are that Caram DOES NOT believe in recording classes, which sucked because the PDFs of the class slides are messed up and miss some of the stuff on the slides. When Caram is writing out an example through the projector, it's easy to get lost. He has messy handwriting, and sort of just runs through it not explaining what's going on, which contributed to not knowing how to apply what he was doing. The work in the class isn't too hard and I think is helpful. However, the tests are a bit tough. Overall, the class was okay, absolutely not my favorite.