Diaconescu is easily the worst instructor I have ever had in terms of teaching. Not once was she able to coherently explain a topic. I am sure she is very intelligent and knowledgeable in her field and her research, but it certainly wasn't communicated through her teaching. Thank God the class was Bruincast because I couldn’t physically sit in that room and listen to her without losing my mind. She's been teaching this class for how many years and still hasn’t bothered to find a way to explain the basics? You will have to do a lot of studying on your own, consulting multiple textbooks and YouTube videos (I recommend UCI and TMP Chem). Her slides were scattered and some lacked important details, while other slides had way too much unnecessary detail. Anything she said in lecture did nothing to explain the slides further, I wouldn’t say she’s mean, but she really wasn’t approachable. This class is supposed to cover so many cool and important topics, and I genuinely feel like I learned nothing. I know it is generally unfair to blame a professor for a bad grade but I’m being serious: Diaconescu ruined any and all passion I had for inorganic chemistry.
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The worst part is, she knew. She knew she couldn’t teach and she knew you didn’t care. She would straight up admit that the topics are too complicated, so here’s what you need to get an A. And we just kind of accepted that. Funny enough, I can tell her attitude rubbed off on her TAs. I went to both their discussions and they both seemed like they didn’t care about what they were teaching and they didn’t care about you, but they were still way better than Diaconescu herself since they actually put some effort into their lectures.
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Anyways, as for the class itself:
All that being said, you can get by in the end fairly easily. I honestly didn't grasp so many of the concepts but scraped with an A. Two midterms, lowest dropped. Midterm 1 was actually fairly easy, Midterm 2 was significantly harder. Final was really hard and focused heavily on the material after Midterm 2, but of course she won’t tell you that, so don’t bother studying the content before that. Midterm 40%, Final 60%. Be warned she does test on topics that are not in the problem sets. Do NOT be an idiot like me and forget to do the extra credit project (worth 5%). All exams also have some extra credit. The problem sets (not required) were pretty good practice but they were usually too short and lacked detail.
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So yeah, she actually *does* set up the class so that it’s possible for most people to get an A. Maybe I’m salty because I was too spoiled with past professors who actually gave half a shit. But I could not find one person in our class that even remotely liked her. Unfortunately if you’re reading this review that means she’s the only professor offering the course and you need it to graduate, so I’m sorry. Just another case of a professor that is much more committed to her research than to teaching.

worst professor that i have so far at UCLA

The class was so bad that I'm laughing thinking about it. The material is actually really interesting but for some reason the chemistry department doesn't mandate linear algebra and this class does not require quantum mechanics so I have no idea how this class is being taught in a way that people can understand, although from people I've talked to, no one cared that much.

Paula is very blunt and arrogant but in the end our grades were significantly boosted, probably to pass all of the seniors who didn't give anymore shits, so in that regards she was generous.

If you care, this class is 70% about symmetry and how symmetry operations translate to generating a basis set of wavefunctions. It's a really cool way to predict energy levels of a molecule without involved QM calculations, but don't worry, because none of what I said is actually discussed in any level of detail at all in the class. This class is mostly hand-waving over the unimportant concepts like that. The other 30% jumps into organometallic chemistry and was basically the final.

I really enjoyed 172 because of all the content and uniting everything taught in 171. The approach to her class is practicing all her homeworks AND the problems in the book. Key is speed and accuracy. Be prepared and don't fall behind. Know those point groups and conceptualize those SALCs. Tricky stuff but it is possible to manage but very easy to fall behind. Good luck!