Large Textbooks- uni science/med students?

[vexx]

hi.

o_o

i just got my chem textbook and it's a very, very large book - unexpectedly large.
roughly 1300 A4 Pages- over three times the size of my 3/4 textbook...

for all you past science/med students, are all your textbooks so big? do they get bigger each year?

and do you actually learn everything in it? like will i be required to know most of the details from each concept on every one of the thousand(s) of pages?!

this is frightening and makes vce chem look like a walk in the park (it isn't of course but in comparison).

thankss haha

i was actually intrigued by the amount of pages, there seems to be so much i have to discover-exciting! but now that i thought about it for longer, it seems like muep chem is going to be really hard ha..

edit. 1111th post!

[Toothpaste]

and do you actually learn everything in it? like will i be required to know most of the details from each concept on every one of the thousand(s) of pages?!

You would probably cover most, but not necessarily all topics in the book depending on how the unit is set out. It's mainly just for reference and you use it as you like. It's up to you whether you want to look more deeply into a certain part of the course or just skim through it. I don't think they would expect you to do chapter/review questions from the book at all (but they might "recommend" it). I remember in MUEP maths we had a list of questions from our massive textbook that we could have a go at, but I personally didn't do many (if any, I probably only did five). My chemistry textbooks for first year were hardly touched unless I needed to check if a tute question was in there, but I'm an extremely lazy student. So yeah, point is, the usage would depend on how academically vigorous you are and whether you need to abuse books to get a better understanding of things.

For VCE books, they're tailored to cover things from the study design and they generally attempt to only include things they feel are relevant. With uni it's 'hey, we are so passionate about this subject so we're going to give you a slab of of information that you can dig through yourselves.' - also many universities probably use the same text so the book would be huge and general to cover a range of unit designs. You'll probably start to see the learning for the sake of knowledge side of things rather than for a number... well you'd hope to.

Having said that, I'm not sure if they treat MUEP chem differently to normal uni classes.

[vexx]

Thanks for the informative reply Toothpaste!

That makes heaps of sense then- Wow that means this Chemistry book is a fantastic guide then.. How exciting as i'd much more prefer to be taught in a lecture/tutorial way then reading up on the section in the book for interest.(i'm kind of lazy like you so i don't know how much i'll be using it after the excitement wears off)

[Mao]

As a note specific to the Chemistry textbook: in CHM1011 and CHM1022, I've used the textbook twice. Neither times were useful and I just ended up asking a demonstrator.

Textbooks are one of those things you'd dig into if you are REALLY into a subject. In reality, you'll hardly open it. [Except for Stewart's Calculus, that book gets used lots. lots and lots and lots]

[vexx]

As a note specific to the Chemistry textbook: in CHM1011 and CHM1022, I've used the textbook twice. Neither times were useful and I just ended up asking a demonstrator.

Textbooks are one of those things you'd dig into if you are REALLY into a subject. In reality, you'll hardly open it. [Except for Stewart's Calculus, that book gets used lots. lots and lots and lots]

Ooh same subject.
That's a shame.. I wonder why they wanted us to buy it then? When we could have perhaps photocopied pages from it or borrowed it from the library if needed. Oh well...

Hopefully i do like it enough to do so- perhaps this year i won't exactly, but maybe in years to come i'll want to learn more when i'm not worrying about my scores of my other subjects.

I actually went through the contents of the book and wrote down the pages of everything that was relevant to my unit 3, which i can use as a reference if i want to explore a topic further though, so maybe it'll be useful there - if i ever do this haha.

Do we go through the topics as they appear in a similar order to the textbook? or not necessarily?

[Toothpaste]

It's probably better to just borrow a copy from the library once you're around uni more. Buying them is understandable with MUEP since it might be tedious to travel to and from with the additional high school hours.

Also don't forget to mega-abuse emailing your tutor questions if they're the type to answer them. Otherwise you could possibly book "appointments" with them (since they are academics and probably have lots of other stuff to do) to go in and ask stuff.