Subject Code/Name: CHEM10003: Chemistry 1Workload: 3 x 1 hr lectures, 1 x 1 hr tutorial, 6 x 3 hr practicals spread throughout the semester, and quite a lot of hours of independent study
(DO THE ZUMDAHL QUESTIONS U GAIZ)
TutorialsSonja Horvat is great (and I mean great, what a wonderful woman), but some other tutors are purportedly not good at all. I still think rocking up to tutes is a good idea, especially if you've attempted the tute questions prior.
Assessment: 6 x 3 hr practicals (20%), 1 x online MST (5%), 1 x ~final exam~ (75%)
Pracs! (3.33% apiece)The chemistry pracs are stressful, and if you're bad at managing time it's very possible that you're going to underperform. Preliminary preparation is an extremely good idea; complete as many of the prac questions/reports as possible BEFORE you enter the labs and make sure you've properly read all the ChemCAL prelabs thoroughly. Try not to get too stressed out during the pracs, though, or you may end up in a pickle that could cost you lots of marks, such as dropping a volumetric flask or incorrectly using the Buchner funnel three times in a row. Demonstrators mark the pracs very unevenly and also vary immensely in the way they brief the prac groups and assist students throughout the pracs. My demonstrator was Dayna, and, while she was willing to help, she was a little scary and marked the pracs quite harshly. My friend had an extremely nice demonstrator who marked pracs extraordinarily generously and she got near to full marks for all her pracs, even when they contained many mistakes. Be especially prepared for pracs 4 and 5; they're time-intensive and involve a LOT of work. Try to be as accurate on prac 4 as you possibly can be, because almost all your marks come from calculations, accurate graphs and data manipulation. For prac 1, also try and wrap your head around error calculations BEFORE you do the prac; this was by far the easiest prac, but the mark I received was my lowest of the semester (14/20) because I had no idea how to do the error calculations that were worth 4 marks (?). Also, DON'T BE CLUMSY. Seriously, if you knock things over or spill them, you could be in trouble, assessment-wise AND safety-wise. If you see a large yellow stain on the floor in one of the corners of the lab, that was me dropping my volumetric flask full of iodide stock solution (and thankfully catching it before it completely emptied, hit the floor and smashed). I'm not really sure what else to say about the pracs because everybody's experiences differed enormously, but be as prepared for them as possible and make sure to work efficiently and meticulously throughout. Also make absolutely sure to wear closed shoes and don't remove your goggles at any point during the pracs, lest your demonstrator gets mad. If you don't wear appropriate clothes, you'll be refused entry to the lab, so BRING YOUR GOGGLES AND LAB COAT AND DON'T WEAR SANDALS. For all that scare talk, the pracs shouldn't be too hard to get an H1 average in if you're on top of things. I had a pretty mean demonstrator, marks-wise, and despite two big screw-ups and constant ruination of the laboratory and my glassware I managed to pull an 83% final average. Most people should be able to average a 15-18/20 for the pracs with some input of effort, but every mark helps buffer your score for the final exam, so keep that in mind!
Mid-Semester Test! (5%) This is a short (30 minute) online test that covers the organic chemistry component of the Chemistry 1 course, and it's a good excuse to revise and grapple with the concepts covered during the first 4 weeks of semester. Since it's taken at home, you have full access to your notes and textbooks, but it pays to have done prior revision if you want to grab those last couple of marks. Make sure you're confident with stereochemistry and NMR/IR/mass spectrometry before you start the test. I was really, really underprepared for the MST and still managed to score 10/12, so don't be too worried about it, especially since it's only worth 5%, but do put the effort into your revision, because you'll need to know the same things for the final exam, which is worth a terrifyingly large amount of marks.
Big, Scary Exam! (/75%/)This exam is very fair, and the only key to doing well is to know everything that the lecturers expect you to know. It's all in their notes, really, minus spectrometry/spectroscopy (just spend a little while reading McMurry, doing the syllabus tests on ChemCAL, looking at some old Year 12 notes and/or finding some things to read online and you'll be fine), so if you've done all the set questions and tackled a few past exams, you'll be in good stead for a decent mark on the exam. Pace yourself and avoid nerves, because there are no tricks, only a few questions that require some lateral thinking, so there's nothing to concern yourself with. If you know your shit, you'll be fine. If you don't know your shit, you won't be fine. It's really that simple. DO learn all the little details the lecturers cover for organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry, but try and single out the big concepts/important equations for gas laws/thermodynamics, and do the set questions on these topics to help yourself figure out which things are actually important. I don't really have any more advice to give; provided you've put in a good chunk of time revising for this exam, you're probably not going to be pushed for time or psyched out by the difficult questions. I left knowing exactly where I'd made some of my errors and I was still fairly confident I had a lot of room for further mistakes before my grade dipped below an H1. Revise, revise, revise and start early (I dedicated 9 days to chemistry and a further 2 to both chemistry and biology) and this exam is seriously not going to be that bad. More importantly, try and pace yourself throughout the semester, or try to start catching up no later than Week 9/10.
Lectopia Enabled: Yes, with screen capture. Things Mark writes down are NOT on the Lectopia recordings, so please make the effort to attend all of his lectures. You can probably rely on Lectopia for Uta and Gus if you really want to.
Past exams available: Yes, they date back to the early 2000s, but the department recommends not completing past exams published prior to 2004-ish due to changed content. Also, solutions are only provided for three/four of the exams. The previous year's exam will also be put up on the LMS in Wiki format for students to use as a study material.
Textbook Recommendation: S S Zumdahl and D J DeCoste Chemical Principles 7th Ed, Cengage Learning, 2013. AND J McMurry, Organic Chemistry 8th Ed, Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning 2012. A laboratory manual and tutorial book are also available for purchase at the Co-op, and you'll need to buy some safety goggles and a lab coat, as well as a lab book if you like, from one of the shops around campus.
I strongly recommend purchasing both textbooks, particularly as a whole slew of them are available at (often drastically) discounted prices via Textbook Exchange. Even if you can't find a single potential seller (highly unlikely), DO buy these books from the Co-op Bookstore. Zumdahl in particular is extraordinarily useful, as the lecturers set questions pertinent to their course content from the book (aside from Mark, who provides a small number of questions in the tutorial book to complement the ChemCAL tutes/test and the tutorial questions). McMurry is probably a good thing to have around when you're stuck on stereochemistry or need to bone up on NMR/IR/mass spectroscopy, and it's used in later years as well (if you decide to continue chemistry), so it can't really hurt to buy it. There are no set questions for McMurry, and no solutions (unless you buy the overpriced solutions manual or manage to find a copy online), so it's best not to rely on it for problems unless you've really got some time to kill. It goes without saying that the lab manual is necessary; you need to pass 4/6 pracs to pass the subject, the pracs comprise a significant 20% of your final mark, and to pass the pracs you're going to need the manual and the ChemCAL slips inside. The tutorial book is also useful as it contains a number of practice questions, some notes and question sets/lists for all the content in the course, minus NMR/IR/mass spectrometry.
Lecturer(s): Mark Rizzacasa, Uta Wille, Angus "Gus" Gray-Weale, Brendan "Tweedledum" Abrahams (totally didn't make the last one up)
MarkMark is the lecturer for the entirety of organic chemistry, and despite his slow pace, he's very thorough and quite interesting to listen to. Make sure to pay careful attention to his final lecture if you've forcibly repressed all of your VCE Chemistry memories like I did, because there are no set questions or provided for IR or NMR spectroscopy or mass spectrometry, and you'll need to know how to solve problems related to these techniques on the exam. Finding extra resources/reading McMurry is a GOOD IDEA. Apart from this little issue with the course, Mark's lectures are all handled with aplomb and are easy to follow, so you should be good to go if you pay attention to his worked problems, verbal utterances and all the supplementary work provided by the chemistry department.
UtaI honestly feel like Uta could have done a much better job of teaching gas laws and thermodynamics (the topics that she covers, albeit only part of thermodynamics), and she could have made it a lot simpler than she did. Listening to her ramble on with her wall of confusing notes up on the screen, I felt like I was never going to grasp thermodynamics. What she presents is overcomplicated and tangled up, but if you DO manage to understand all her content after some reading, you'll be in an EXTREMELY good position for the exam. Hint: like she always stresses, most important to consider: UNITS UNITS UNITS! If you're dragging yourself out of bed for the morning Chemistry stream, maybe sleep in and use Uta's notes + Lectopia to get through her part of the course. Zumdahl questions will be extremely helpful, if you have the textbook. (All that said, she IS a fairly amusing person in her own right, so don't expect to hate her or anything.)
GusGus covers a bunch of thermodynamical concepts, focusing mainly on entropy. He tries his best to make it comprehensible to a bunch of clueless first-year chemistry students, but I have to say his "arrow of time" video didn't really help much. Do try and understand as much of his lectures as possible, even though he's forced to take the "just accept that it works for now because I said so" approach to teaching his content, and then revise/do questions from the textbook/tutorial book at home, and really make sure to read his notes. Scan them for key points; it's likely he'll throw a bunch of concept-based questions onto the exam, which are free marks if you remember what he's written down and impossible to reason through if you haven't read the lecture notes at all. Overall, a decent lecturer who sets pretty forgiving questions and does his best to step you through entropy, but ultimately fails because it's not really something you can just "get".
Brendan-senpai Brendan Abrahams covers the final component of the Chemistry 1 course (a number of minor topics towards the end as well as a large amount of material relating to VSEPR, covalent bonding, ionic structure and acid-base chemistry), and he is the sweetest, most helpful lecturer, explaining everything with aplomb and in an extremely clear manner. It's easy to tell he has a qualification in education as well as science (he actually does) due to the way he approaches his content delivery; it's clear and concise, though some people felt quite patronised by the way he taught his topics. His lecture notes are also fantastically clear and, in combination with the textbook questions he sets, make learning what he covers not overly difficult. He also reminds me of Tweedledee/Tweedledum from Alice in Wonderland and that gives him extra brownie points, OK.
Year & Semester of completion: 2013, Semester 1
Rating: 5 out of 5!
Your Mark/Grade: 86 (a very unexpected H1)
Comments: Chemistry 1 is a content-dense introduction to a wide variety of chemical concepts that expands on certain parts of VCE Chemistry and introduces a number of new concepts that follow on logically from those you've already studied in the past. That said, if you, like me, forcibly screened all VCE content from your brain after your final exams, you're not really at much of a disadvantage if you put in the time and effort. Practicals are intense but not too horrible, tutorials can be great depending on your tutor, and there are lots of opportunities to use the learning centre throughout the semester if you have any questions for tutors or even lecturers regarding CHEM10003. This subject really is very well run and there are lots of resources at your disposal if you're motivated enough to utilise them. Topics covered include organic chemistry, thermodynamics and inorganic chemistry.
Organic ChemistryYou cover sigma- and pi-bonds, hybridisation, theory of organic molecules, bond lengths/angles, steric/torsional strain, Newman projections, cyclohexane alkanes, alkenes, alkynes, cyclic hydrocarbons, aromatics and conjugation/delocalisation, cyclohexane and the ring flip, axial and equatorial positions, functional groups, stereochemistry (chirality and cis-trans isomerism especially, as well as some things on meso-compounds and enantiomers), a little on geometric isomers and other minor things that should be fairly easy to pick up on, and then (very briefly, but by no means least importantly) NMR, IR and mass spectrometry, which are analytical techniques commonly used in organic chemistry for molecule identification and analysis. Mark covers all these concepts with great competence, but stereochemistry WILL confuse you at first. Go home and try to wrap your head around visualising molecules in three dimensions. It'll take a while, but once you get it, it sticks and questions/problems subsequently become quite easy to solve! Note that bond angles/lengths and IR absorption bands are NOT provided in the examination, so you do need to memorise those given.
Gas Laws and ThermodynamicsYou cover gas laws and equations and the kinetic theory of matter, ideal gas behaviours, the Van der Waals equation, intermolecular forces, Hess' Law, enthalpy, work, heat, non-state and state functions, energy levels, standard enthalpies of formation, calorimetry and a bunch of other things I can't be bothered remembering. In any case, thermo is best understood by actually analysing the content and doing the questions. Learn the mean free path, average kinetic energy, heat, work, internal energy, enthalpy (delta H= deltaU + delta(PV), NOT PdeltaV, as it depends on the given conditions; this is IMPORTANT if you want to avoid mistakes), heat related to heat capacity and standard enthalpy equations, and don't worry about the rest. Do get really good at manipulating units and provided data, and make sure you're able to logically work through things by understanding what the equations are saying. Lots of questions rely on you being able to analyse the situation. Standard enthalpy conditions, unit conversions and hidden units are common trip-ups for this part of the course and can make it very easy to get a question wrong or completely fail to understand a question (the Mg question on the exam was a classic example, and I'm ashamed to say I didn't get it after all the practice I did).
More Thermodynamics inc. Equilibrium and EntropyProbably the hardest part of the course. I'm not entirely sure WHAT we covered; it all sort of makes sense in my brain when I look at the content and my notes, but I don't really know how to categorise this stuff. Try to get past the whole "just accept it works b/c first year" mentality you're surrounded by and focus on understanding what you're actually presented with. It's not a whole lot, but it's quite important to have a vague understanding of the big ideas of Gus' lectures as well as the equations and calculations. Equilibrium questions are quite easy, but for everything else that isn't concept-based you'll want to be comfortable with unit conversions, equation manipulation and all that jazz. There are two equations you can only learn if you either pay REALLY close attention to the notes or actually do the Zumdahl questions. I /strongly/ recommend doing the Zumdahl questions!
Inorganic ChemistryYou cover a whole bunch of acid-base stuff (which can be quite tricky, though there are lots of methods for working efficiently through the problems that I'll leave you to hopefully discover), then a whole bunch of VSEPR, molecular orbital theory and hybridisation, and covalent bonding and polarity/dispersion forces, ionic and metallic structure (not difficult to comprehend at all, but many people find it to be at first glance), general chemistry and trends of the periodic table and its substituent elements and a whole bunch of minor, seemingly arbitrary concepts in between. My advice for this section of the course is to learn everything presented in the lecture slides, attend lectures and complete all set questions and ChemCAL exercises. Don't neglect the miscellany of facts in the final two lectures, because they're IMPORTANT! You should be fine for all this if you revise thoroughly.
Chemistry 1 is a fantastically run and very broad subject that is useful for an enormous range of pathways. While you'll find yourself "forgetting" a lot of the thermodynamics equations and specific details from the course after completing the subject, the knowledge you've gained is somewhere in the back of your head, and if you can bring it back out it's surprising how often little segments of the course can aid you in other areas of study (I found it helpful for BIOL10004 and even once in MAST10005, even though I was studying them concurrently). Strongly recommended for ALL life science majors and earth sciences, essential for chemistry-based majors, chemical engineering and some life science majors and probably also a good complement to physics and statistics majors, this course is not easy, but the knowledge base is extremely useful and is excellently taught, so if you have a free space in your timetable or know your major requires or is made easier by taking chemistry subjects, then CHEM10003 is a must.