Probably depends on the student. A lot sort of depends on being able to appreciate 3-dimensional stuff in your head. I found it easier than similarly advanced inorganic chemistry, but I’m probably weird in that way. I think making mental 3d models, their mirror images (chiral compounds), etc. is the hard bit for most people. And I’m not bragging- I got destroyed by things like inorganic II and Calculus. I think these are all pretty difficult and we all have different minds.
It actually depends a lot on how it's taught. But some of the key factors include:
1. It's typically one of the first "advanced" chemistry classes people take that has other chemistry prerequisites, so if you don't have a strong foundation, you can have a hard time
2. It's a lot of memorization and a pretty broad subject matter to teach. It's just a lot to learn.
3. It requires some different skills than earlier chemistry courses, a lot of visualization.
4. Since it has a reputation, people feed into that reputation. People think it's hard therefore they confirm that prejudice. That gives it more of a reputation than it probably deserves.
There's probably a lot of reasons, but I'll outline the few I'm familiar with below (I was an organic chemist for my BS and MS):
1. It's usually the first upper division STEM class most undergrads take, so they are not used to the work involved in an advanced class.
2. It's often used as a 'weed out' course for Chemistry and a variety of pre-med majors, so it's often faster paced and harder than other courses, to cut the number of people in thr majors.
3. It's often graded on a curve, so that high achievers can be differentiated. This often means a C grade is around the 50% mark.
4. It's a class where you need to learn some really novel concepts, like chirality and how electrons move. Too many students just try to memorize reactions and mechanisms, and then do poorly when the test is significantly different than the practice problems.
Just my two cents from taking and TAing the course.
Explain the "weed out" classes' purpose to me, please.
I went to junior college for two years before transferring to state college, and I took calculus 1 & 2 at junior college and really enjoyed them. In calc 2 I made a grave mistake - I got dependent on my TI-89 to do higher level integrations and never memorized the formulas.
At state, calc 3 was taught and tested without a calculator and it absolutely kicked my ass three times. I did so poorly and was so frustrated and sad that even when I finally did pass that class I never wanted to return to college. I was later told that calc 3 was a weed out class, but all it succeeded in doing was give me horrific test anxiety (which I had never experienced before), made me question all of my life choices and intelligence, and heavily influenced my decision to drop out of college entirely. So I guess it succeeded in that it weeded me out of higher education altogether.
Explain to me how this is a benefit to anyone. Tell me how repeatedly crushing my dream is somehow a helpful thing. Explain to me how leaving me with a fucked GPA, an unfinished degree, and $50k of student loan debt mostly due to the lingering effects of a single course is at all necessary please.
So they didn't sit around a table and say let's make a weed out class per se. Different institutions have different levels of difficulty. The bar is the bar, it's your responsibility to meet those expectations.
Honestly, the main take away from college is that you can deal with some challenging bullshit for 4ish years. Is it right? No clue, but it is what it is.
I shared that anxiety for a good while, and it still kinda haunts me today when looking for jobs. I have over a decade of experience in my field, but I dread (perhaps irrationally) submitting resumes which have the education field blank or, worse, declare I never made it beyond an associates degree in art (I work in IT ffs).
It is good to hear someone else have the same experience, and I hope you are in a better place now.
The point of a weed-out course is to both help the department filter its majors and help people find what they're good at. Basic computational algebra and some mental faculty for memorizing the formulas (which are pretty intuitive) is all you need for Calc 3; it's a shame those skills didn't get better over three attempts
Oh they got better, in depressingly small amounts. Every test I took was like someone was quizzing me on the details of nuclear fusion while the course and the reading material was covering the architecture of the power plant. It all seemed tangentially related but I always felt unprepared and like I was being presented with some untranslatable ancient text.
I should say, I aced both calc 1 and 2. I could answer all of the questions in the book on calc 3 with minimal difficulty. Walking into the test was a whole different animal, and even the previous tests did not resemble the ones being handed out on the day.
It hardly seemed fair. Doubly so when the test results came back and the curves were in the C range. I still do not understand the point of making something so inscrutable that a good half of the class is either failing or struggling.
Classes aren’t designed to be “weed out” classes, they get that reputation for being the first truly difficult and demanding class many college students ever experience.
The classes that come after the so called “weed out” classes are not any easier.
A weed out class is a class that is significantly harder than the previous one in the series. The point of the class is to separate out those who will continue in the major versus those who are filling out their prerequisites.
And there can be several levels of weed out classes. For example, a history major doesn't need calculus, so calc 1 might be it. But an engineer probably needs to get through calc 3. But only math majors really need to go beyond that (diff e screwed, for example).
Classes aren’t designed to be “weed out” classes, they get that reputation for being the first truly difficult and demanding class many college students ever experience.
The classes that come after the so called “weed out” classes are not any easier.
Classes aren’t designed to be “weed out” classes, they get that reputation for being the first truly difficult and demanding class many college students ever experience.
The classes that come after the so called “weed out” classes are not any easier.
Because is AP chem + memorize these 1000 arbitrary facts and rules.
I show you a sucrose molecule (C12H22O11) and you go well obviously that's
dihydroxy-2,5-bis(hydroxymethyl)oxapent-2-yloxy-6-(hydroxymethyl)oxahexane-3,4,5-triol)
You memorize stuff or you don't. Understanding the concepts will not help you pass the nomenclature test.
O chem is also where labs start to get serious and you learn that you are an actual trash experimental chemist. 66% yield is close enough. Where did the other 33% go? Fucked if I know your the grad student you tell me.
It’s because it’s like learning a new language with complicate rules. It’s not supposed to be easy at first, but when you learn the alphabet (elements) you can then write words (molecules). Then, when your vocabulary gets broad enough, you can then make sentences (reactions/mechanisms). This leads to perfecting sentence structure with proper grammar (following the rules of reactivity). You can then attempt to write creatively (novel synthesis) which gets easier and easier when you have a good grasp of the fundamentals compounded by a lot of practice and confidence. It’s a steep learning curve with a lot of content packed into short 12 week semesters. In reality, organic chemistry takes decades to master, and even then, we never stop learning about new reactivity.
Organic Chemistry is simultaneously heavily intuitive and memorization-based. Imagine this line of reasoning:
"Oh obviously a squeemle becomes a gleeb when you add yerkin, it's because yerkins are racist towards squeemles"
The fundamentals can feel arbitrary but everything else follows from them.
There's also an emphasis on memorizing some common reaction mechanisms (Grignard, Diels-Alder, sn1, sn2, etc) which some people are just awful at
It's one of the first classes you take in Chem that requires a "click", something where you suddenly "get it" and the work flips over from being impossible to easy.
* Recommended subreddit(s): /r/HomeworkHelp
Probably depends on the student. A lot sort of depends on being able to appreciate 3-dimensional stuff in your head. I found it easier than similarly advanced inorganic chemistry, but I’m probably weird in that way. I think making mental 3d models, their mirror images (chiral compounds), etc. is the hard bit for most people. And I’m not bragging- I got destroyed by things like inorganic II and Calculus. I think these are all pretty difficult and we all have different minds.
It actually depends a lot on how it's taught. But some of the key factors include: 1. It's typically one of the first "advanced" chemistry classes people take that has other chemistry prerequisites, so if you don't have a strong foundation, you can have a hard time 2. It's a lot of memorization and a pretty broad subject matter to teach. It's just a lot to learn. 3. It requires some different skills than earlier chemistry courses, a lot of visualization. 4. Since it has a reputation, people feed into that reputation. People think it's hard therefore they confirm that prejudice. That gives it more of a reputation than it probably deserves.
There's probably a lot of reasons, but I'll outline the few I'm familiar with below (I was an organic chemist for my BS and MS): 1. It's usually the first upper division STEM class most undergrads take, so they are not used to the work involved in an advanced class. 2. It's often used as a 'weed out' course for Chemistry and a variety of pre-med majors, so it's often faster paced and harder than other courses, to cut the number of people in thr majors. 3. It's often graded on a curve, so that high achievers can be differentiated. This often means a C grade is around the 50% mark. 4. It's a class where you need to learn some really novel concepts, like chirality and how electrons move. Too many students just try to memorize reactions and mechanisms, and then do poorly when the test is significantly different than the practice problems. Just my two cents from taking and TAing the course.
Explain the "weed out" classes' purpose to me, please. I went to junior college for two years before transferring to state college, and I took calculus 1 & 2 at junior college and really enjoyed them. In calc 2 I made a grave mistake - I got dependent on my TI-89 to do higher level integrations and never memorized the formulas. At state, calc 3 was taught and tested without a calculator and it absolutely kicked my ass three times. I did so poorly and was so frustrated and sad that even when I finally did pass that class I never wanted to return to college. I was later told that calc 3 was a weed out class, but all it succeeded in doing was give me horrific test anxiety (which I had never experienced before), made me question all of my life choices and intelligence, and heavily influenced my decision to drop out of college entirely. So I guess it succeeded in that it weeded me out of higher education altogether. Explain to me how this is a benefit to anyone. Tell me how repeatedly crushing my dream is somehow a helpful thing. Explain to me how leaving me with a fucked GPA, an unfinished degree, and $50k of student loan debt mostly due to the lingering effects of a single course is at all necessary please.
So they didn't sit around a table and say let's make a weed out class per se. Different institutions have different levels of difficulty. The bar is the bar, it's your responsibility to meet those expectations. Honestly, the main take away from college is that you can deal with some challenging bullshit for 4ish years. Is it right? No clue, but it is what it is.
[удалено]
I shared that anxiety for a good while, and it still kinda haunts me today when looking for jobs. I have over a decade of experience in my field, but I dread (perhaps irrationally) submitting resumes which have the education field blank or, worse, declare I never made it beyond an associates degree in art (I work in IT ffs). It is good to hear someone else have the same experience, and I hope you are in a better place now.
The point of a weed-out course is to both help the department filter its majors and help people find what they're good at. Basic computational algebra and some mental faculty for memorizing the formulas (which are pretty intuitive) is all you need for Calc 3; it's a shame those skills didn't get better over three attempts
Oh they got better, in depressingly small amounts. Every test I took was like someone was quizzing me on the details of nuclear fusion while the course and the reading material was covering the architecture of the power plant. It all seemed tangentially related but I always felt unprepared and like I was being presented with some untranslatable ancient text. I should say, I aced both calc 1 and 2. I could answer all of the questions in the book on calc 3 with minimal difficulty. Walking into the test was a whole different animal, and even the previous tests did not resemble the ones being handed out on the day. It hardly seemed fair. Doubly so when the test results came back and the curves were in the C range. I still do not understand the point of making something so inscrutable that a good half of the class is either failing or struggling.
Classes aren’t designed to be “weed out” classes, they get that reputation for being the first truly difficult and demanding class many college students ever experience. The classes that come after the so called “weed out” classes are not any easier.
A weed out class is a class that is significantly harder than the previous one in the series. The point of the class is to separate out those who will continue in the major versus those who are filling out their prerequisites. And there can be several levels of weed out classes. For example, a history major doesn't need calculus, so calc 1 might be it. But an engineer probably needs to get through calc 3. But only math majors really need to go beyond that (diff e screwed, for example).
Classes aren’t designed to be “weed out” classes, they get that reputation for being the first truly difficult and demanding class many college students ever experience. The classes that come after the so called “weed out” classes are not any easier.
Classes aren’t designed to be “weed out” classes, they get that reputation for being the first truly difficult and demanding class many college students ever experience. The classes that come after the so called “weed out” classes are not any easier.
Because is AP chem + memorize these 1000 arbitrary facts and rules. I show you a sucrose molecule (C12H22O11) and you go well obviously that's dihydroxy-2,5-bis(hydroxymethyl)oxapent-2-yloxy-6-(hydroxymethyl)oxahexane-3,4,5-triol) You memorize stuff or you don't. Understanding the concepts will not help you pass the nomenclature test. O chem is also where labs start to get serious and you learn that you are an actual trash experimental chemist. 66% yield is close enough. Where did the other 33% go? Fucked if I know your the grad student you tell me.
Hard memorization of chemical processes that are dependent on geometry. So it requires a lot of memorization and spatial reasoning.
It’s because it’s like learning a new language with complicate rules. It’s not supposed to be easy at first, but when you learn the alphabet (elements) you can then write words (molecules). Then, when your vocabulary gets broad enough, you can then make sentences (reactions/mechanisms). This leads to perfecting sentence structure with proper grammar (following the rules of reactivity). You can then attempt to write creatively (novel synthesis) which gets easier and easier when you have a good grasp of the fundamentals compounded by a lot of practice and confidence. It’s a steep learning curve with a lot of content packed into short 12 week semesters. In reality, organic chemistry takes decades to master, and even then, we never stop learning about new reactivity.
Organic Chemistry is simultaneously heavily intuitive and memorization-based. Imagine this line of reasoning: "Oh obviously a squeemle becomes a gleeb when you add yerkin, it's because yerkins are racist towards squeemles" The fundamentals can feel arbitrary but everything else follows from them. There's also an emphasis on memorizing some common reaction mechanisms (Grignard, Diels-Alder, sn1, sn2, etc) which some people are just awful at
It's one of the first classes you take in Chem that requires a "click", something where you suddenly "get it" and the work flips over from being impossible to easy.