How is this class? Is Dr. Switzer still teaching this course? I heard he retired and some new lady is teaching it now? How is she? Thank you for your inputs.

9/29/2008 12:47:35 PM

courseware has 'rabah' listed


so i'm guessing switzer is out

9/29/2008 1:40:50 PM

Dr. Switzer does not teach the course as of this past spring. Now, Dr. Rabah (female) teaches the class. Overall, the lab component is where you gain the most experience. The course is not overly difficult, but you must do well in the lab in order to do well in the course. The subject matter and lectures are decidedly boring. In my class, out of roughly 120 students enrolled just about 20 showed up regularly for lecture. I would say that attending lectures did not greatly enhance my ability to succeed in the course, but I prefer to attend classes in general. There are many, many webassigns for both the lecture and the lab. Extensive use of Excel is required and each week you will be expected to create a spreadsheet for managing your laboratory data (pre-lab assignment). The Excels can often be extremely tedious and time consuming. The course expects a rather thorough background in statistics going in. You will be using t-tests, z-scores, confidence intervals, and propagation of uncertainty from the first to the last day of the class. There is no solid connection to CH101 or CH201 in terms of the subject matter. There will be some basic solution calculations and stoichiometry, but otherwise the material is all new. The labs are extremely long and will run the entire length of the scheduled time. Another common frustration was the fact that our glassware was always poorly cleaned and contaminated with chemicals that ruined the results of the experiment, which led us to have to start over. We were constantly having to clean our glassware thoroughly before every experiment which was time consuming since a typical experiment used 10-20 pieces of glassware. Your laboratory skills are extremely important for the experiments since you are working with rather low concentrations (micro and nano molar). It is not like in CH101 and CH201 labs where you get the same grade regardless of how the experiment turned out, you have to actually get good results to get a good grade and sharing data with other groups is typically prohibited. Sorry if this ran a little long-- but I hope it helps!

9/29/2008 1:50:17 PM

switzer was a complete idiot who was an ASS if you didn't immediately pick up on quantitative

before my major dropped CH315 as a requirement, i had to take it...i ended up graduating with a 3.76 GPA, and this is the ONLY class i "failed"

i ACED the lab...the only student in my section to correctly identify the molecular weight of the unknown within 0.0001, but bombed the classroom aspect

took it the following summer session under hendrickson and got an A in the class

^ pretty much

[Edited on September 29, 2008 at 3:11 PM. Reason : .]

9/29/2008 3:10:32 PM

^ I was also the only student to correctly identify the molecular weight of the unknown within 0.001 (it was actually only recorded to three decimal places not four) But I took about 30 minutes to clean my glassware before starting. Nobody else cleaned their glassware that thoroughly and they ended up getting 0 points for that lab practical.

9/29/2008 7:25:29 PM

^ ah, i couldn't remember how many places...i'm meticulous in a lab, so the lab was pretty easy, since all i had to do is what i'd always been doing

*shrug*...i'm glad switzer's gone

10/1/2008 4:19:52 PM

did one of you lab geniuses save your webassigns for the prelabs?? I have rabah and doing pretty horrible.

10/2/2008 4:11:12 PM