I would like to start off by saying that I was almost deterred from taking this class due to the numerous scary reviews about Professor Scerri. Unfortunately (or fortunately I should say), he was the only teacher teaching the class the quarter I needed it, so I took the risk and enrolled in his class... and I am extremely glad that I did!

I know Professor Scerri has a reputation for himself, and it is possible that in the past this reputation was reflective of him, but if so, he has definitely changed very much. After taking 14B with him, I can confidently say that he was nothing at all like the reviews I had read about him. Here, I will document my most notable experiences for anyone looking to take this class:

Attendance: Professor Scerri did not have a mandatory attendance policy in his class, although he highly encouraged IRL participation. Given this, however, all lectures were recorded and posted on the canvas page in a timely fashion, and in the case that any of the recordings for a certain class were unavailable or corrupted, he would post a replacement video in lieu of that unavailable lecture (he was very accommodating).

Assignments: The only graded assignments were quizzes that were assigned through the Achieve platform. Essentially, these quizzes were grouped by topic, each containing around 30 or so questions with unlimited attempts per question. These quizzes were also assigned at the beginning of the term with a due date near finals week, so lots of time to complete them with no pressure! (However, I would highly recommend completing the appropriate quiz after finishing the relevant content in the class, just to stay on track because it is very difficult to cram all the questions at the end of the quarter).

Exams: Here's the kicker for a lot of students. I personally thought that Professor Scerri's exams were very fair and honestly not too difficult. I know that this is just my opinion and that other students may have had different experiences, but I think I did a decent amount of studying for his exams and performed just as well as I anticipated. The course consisted of one midterm and one final, with the midterm and final being worth 30% and 40% of your final grade, respectively. Professor Scerri provided previous exams from his class as practice material for the exams and the questions were relatively similar in difficulty, so no real surprises on exam day. Honestly, as long as you do enough practice using the questions given to you by Professor Scerri and the TAs, you should be more than fine.

Final Remarks: Honestly, I would say that whether you like him or not, Professor Scerri's 14B course was more than fair and truly not too difficult so long as you actually practiced and studied your fair share—nothing more, nothing less. I would HIGHLY recommend this class to anyone looking to take 14B. Please do not be afraid to take this class like I was, it will all be fine :)

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!

Horrible I think id rather be shot multiple times than take this class again. I really don't like him and I can safely speak for the majority of people when I say this.