One drawback of the above formulation is that the current implementation does not yield a correct variational energy. This is because the electronic gradient and Hessian used during SCF calculations is approximated such that the algorithm remains consistent with that of the gas phase calculation. The approximation introduced in the electronic gradient assumes that the state-averaged and state-specific ASCs are identical, as described in the Appendix (Eqs. ( ) and ( )), and the approximate orbital Hessian should be the first term in Eq. (52). While this is clearly not the case and remains a crude approximation, we expect that solutions obtained using approximate gradients and Hessian will still be reasonably close to the true solution, provided iterative optimization converges. With PCM, SCF convergence is indeed slower and may suffer from another type of root-flipping problem, particularly for excited states.