How to Get an A- in Organic Chemistry
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Anyways, I just wanted to share a few of my orgo stories. Our first exam mean scores were in the 20%'s. Only 10 of us got above 70%. There is NO curve in his class. He talked about this after the first exam, and he said, "Many of you are asking me if there's a curve. I wouldn't hesitate to call 90% and above an A." The first test was so brutal, that after he called the 15 minute left mark, a whole sea of "HOly shit! WTF?!" spread throughout the lecture hall. It was shortly after that, one of the students was escorted out by a grad student proctor because he peed his pants. I was already light headed from the intensity of the exam, but seeing a guy literally pee in his pants almost made me pass out.
In retrospect, orgo isn't that bad. If I had taken it the previous year with another professor who was using the McMurry textbook, I would have even said it was pretty easy. But, no. I was stuck with Tius, and I was stuck with an entry level graduate textbook on organic chemistry--this part is no joke. However, in retrospect, I also realized Tius wasn't bad either. I realized that if I just worked on his assigned problem sets and studied those for the exams, I would have done fine. The exam mostly consisted of the problem set. So, he was very fair. However, all of the urban legend stories made me so scared, I was doing all the problems in the chapter which often took 50-60 hrs a week to complete.
For anyone thinking about taking orgo, it's really not that bad. However, like any other course, the professor and books can make it incredibly hard. Just be wary of that.
BTW, I did get an A in both orgo courses. I majored in math and chemistry, and I have to say, that class with Tius was by FAR the hardest shit I ever had to go through. And that includes a general chemistry course with another brutally hard chem professor in which I stood up three nights in a row to study for the third exam because I was so behind. I got an A in that class too.
Let me expand on how it works in a German university. There are no curves, the concept is completely foreign here. Your grade is 100% determined by a final exam. You do exercises only to get approval for writing the final exam in the first place.
Not grading on a curve is a horrible idea. It means the exam must be limited to material that is taught, rather than limiting it to known knowledge in the universe. German University sounds like a big ass certification program, not a real university.
Maybe I misunderstand what this curve grading is all about, but doesn't grading on a curve mean the grade is not a measure of how good one is, but how one compares to other people who happened to be taking the exam at the same time? So you don't have to be any good to get a top grade - just better than other people taking the exam at the same time? And likewise, you could be the world's tenth greatest living chemist, but if the other nine people taking the exam are the world's top nine, you'll fail.
And not doing this is "a horrible idea"?
My point is that a professor should be able to write 20 questions that are relevant and interesting, and just look at the distribution of results to assign grades. I think that makes sense, rather than turning university exams into certification style exams.
My answer to why, it is a horrible idea to not grade on a curve requires and anecdote:
I took an impossibly hard math course with about 15 students where the average grade was a 2, I got a 4, one guy got a 6, and another guy got an 8. The professor gave me an A, but in reality, I was 4 orders of magnitude dumber than the best student. Professors have discretion. The main reason I tell this story, is that the guys that got a 6/10 and and 8/10 have both gone on to have an 8-figure net-worth (fuck-you money). One through finance, and another through a startup. It has been awesome to see the people that I know are insanely smart become insanely wealthy.
The important part of this anecdote is that the professors that wrote the exam wrote two questions that one of smartest humans on earth could not answer. How fucked up would the world be if the professor had only written the 4 questions we all got it right? Asking impossible questions creates greatness. Grading on a curve enables professors to find truly exceptional people.
"How fucked up would the world be if the professor had only written the 4 questions we all got it right?"
This just doesn't make sense. What are you trying to say? Did you mean to ask "What happens if there were only four questions and we all got it right?"
"My point is that a professor should be able to write 20 questions that are relevant and interesting, and just look at the distribution of results to assign grades."
Fine. My point is that this means you're being marked on the basis of how well you did compared to everyone else who took the exam, which means it's not a measure of how good you are; it's a measure of how good you are compared to the others taking the exam. If the purpose of taking the exam is to demonstrate you know the material, grading on a curve subverts and corrupts that purpose. Any exam in which your mark depends on how well other people do in the exam is a nonsense; your mark should only depend on how well you do in the exam. If the professor knows the exam is horrifically difficult and thinks that to score twenty percent is amazing, you should get a good mark for reaching twenty percent, even if everyone else scores fifty percent.
I believe it acts as a check to make sure that the class is well taught, and the questions of an appropriate difficulty level.
If every student receives an F for a 40% correct (and they all only get 40% correct), a curve normalizes that. Students who understand the material as it was presented and tested better than others receive a higher grade.
Makes good sense to me. The problems arise in the Harvard situation, where nobody is curved down. If you down curve inflated scores downward, then a curve only serves to inflate grades and is less useful.
If every one in the class was lazy to study/prepare for the exam and every one ended up getting less than 40% correct, then they all deserve to get F. Normalizing with a curve means, it's possible that someone who got only 39% in that exam in a class full of lazy folks who all scored much less than him, can earn a A or A+ ! Compare this to similar class/exam taken by different set of students (all brilliant) at a different time or place, who all worked hard and scored above 80% but still some of them could get B or C's due to curve grading. Wouldn't it be unfair to the 80% scorer who got a C whereas some one who scored a 39% on the same subject got A+ due to circumstances (time and peers he took the exam with) !! How is that fair at all?
It's hard enough writing a good exam -- maximally descriminating, useful pedagogically, not unintentionally ambiguous -- without also requiring it to be mechanistically translatable to a semester grade.
Well, the parent doesn't actually agree that that's the point of the exam:
"The exams were not to demonstrate you are certified in a subject, but rather to show your ability and limits."
But yeah, I think jcampbell1 is exaggerating and a little too proud.
Disagree. Asking the question didn't create the greatness. It was there to begin with.
Just add a bonus question, what's wrong with that? People who don't give a shit can ignore it. Those who truly care will solve it because it's there.
Thank you Harvard.
Exams are not at all restricted to the material taught; usually, knowing all the covered material and being able to reproduce it will only get you as far as 50%, allowing you to pass. Points above that will come from novel applications of the material you learned, or tests on the general concepts and approaches you should have learned.
>novel applications of the material you learned
>tests on the general concepts and approaches you should have learned.
The difference is that top US universities will ask questions that there is no reason you should possibly know the answer, and questions that only a person obsessed with the subject matter would possibly know. Grading on a curve allows the professors to ask really hard questions. Both knowledgeable students and exceptional students get the same grade, but the exceptional students get recommendations.
You probably think the US is very unfair. It is.
In the US, it is common that half the class gets a 50%, 10 people get a 70%, and one person gets a 90%. That one person is not lumped in with the rest. She is tracked to win a future Nobel prize.
Top US university exams are not the same as Microsoft certifications.
And that is precisely the same in Germany; I've seen my share of exams where anything above 70% was the equivalent to an A, because nobody could realistically be expected to get 90%, let alone 100%; with questions where "there is no reason you should possibly know the answer, and questions that only a person obsessed with the subject matter would possibly know". I've seen courses where four out of five students failed the exam.
I have absolutely no idea where you get the idea that it's like a Microsoft certification. The difference in Germany is that if nobody gets an A, then nobody gets an A, period [1]. If everybody fails the course, then, well, everybody fails the course.
Part of the reason is that German universities traditionally have had pretty open admission policies; which meant that there never was much room for a C for effort. Grades had to mean something, namely that the student was deserving of a degree. And that meant that students had to be graded relative to the degree requirements, not relative to the rest of the class. And they ask really hard questions so that they can differentiate between the good and the brilliant.
For what it's worth, I've taken graduate math courses both in Germany and in the US; I think I have a pretty good idea what it's like in either country.
[1] Actually, Germany doesn't have an alphabetic system for grades, but you get the idea.
To turn that around, grading on a curve means that the test can have nothing to do with the material taught in the course--and so cannot be used paired with a pre-test to calculate the effectiveness of the course (and of the professor) in teaching the material. (Not that such things are even measured in Universities, especially for tenured professors...)
Degrees in Germany were traditionally research degrees (this may have changed when they introduced the Bachelor), and this explains why exams are done the way they are done.
The thesis at the end is substantial (a Diplom or Magister thesis was a year of genuine research), you would hand it in, they would examine you, and if you passed you would be admitted to the club. That's what German universities are, exclusive clubs.
Of course, before you can go and start writing, there are all sorts of prerequisites to be fulfilled. There is sufficient interaction between the students and faculty to spot the geniuses, the good and average students, and the hopeless cases. The hopeless ones would be failed out within the first two years.
Eventually, he agreed and our company drafted a press release (it was a big coup for us). Apparently, the initial draft that was sent to Corey said something like, "Dr. Corey's lab is one of the premier laboratories in the world for organic synthesis...." The revision that Corey sent back crossed out the words "one of".
He was unapologetic about the subject matter being difficult and believed that teachers who didn't teach it hard and try to really force undergrads to understand it were cheating themselves.
He was especially adamant about it because many undergrads taking organic are trying to go to medical school and didn't like the idea of letting lazy or stupid people become doctors on his watch.
When we were grading tests, he would laugh as he marked errors and delivered low grades. "Hexavalent carbon? WRONG. Saving lives... Saving lives..."
The functional group approach exposes you early and often to seemingly non-sensical (or at least challenging) exceptions that don't seem to follow any pattern, all of which makes perfect sense when you learn them grouped with other situations where the same mechanism applies.
You should always read this as code for "to reduce the number of Asian students admitted".
That said, I do agree that soft skills are probably valuable for doctors.
I'm pointing this out to give her more credit for making the career change (at 42) to become a doctor. It'd be different if she were an engineer who became a science journalist and then later decided to become a doctor...This is assuming that if you didn't do something like o-chem as an undergrad (many engineers do o-chem or an equivalent hard science topic to graduate), doing it at 42 is quite the brave shift.
This is not true for chemistry. Even chemists disagree vehemently on why, for example alkanes are staggered in the lowest energy conformation. Is it because the electrical charges in the hydrogen electron orbital clouds have a weak repulsive effect? Or is it because the hydrogen electron density can partially donate into the sigma antibonding orbital and stabilize the conformation at the expense of a little bit of bond stability?
1. Organic chemistry is often the first class that a prospective future doctor takes that requires you to develop proper study habits. One can get away with most other introductory level courses in the sciences by cramming during the day or two before the exam. Organic chemistry is different--it requires structured and daily studying. This is an essential skill for anyone planning to go to medical school.
2. Organic chemistry teaches you to thing and reason about objects in three-dimensional space. Stereochemistry (roughly: if something is right handed or left handed) is an essential idea in organic chemistry. Being able to think about objects in 3D space is a very useful ability (and necessary) for a future doctor.
I am a really lousy cook. I am not handy; I'm fairly certain my relatives laugh at me behind my back. And I did high school chemistry lots of years earlier. In short, a background which promise pain when studying organic chemistry.
I was so stressed in the lab, that when a small fire started between me and the exit (a student used a poor way of evaporating she'd learned in a previous course), I just thought "Ah, the fire extinguisher is by the exit with the other students, someone else can stop the fire, I'm too busy.". Luckily, someone did. (This fire was a minor scandal; could have really damaged the accident statistics.)
That said, the organic chemistry and lab work was incredibly fun and giving. It really surprised me that I loved the subject.
You needed protective covering, built interesting stuff, used vacuum to evaporate, boiled stuff in oil baths to get much higher than water temperature. You could read the "things I won't work with" blog ( http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with... ) and shudder at the FOOF formula.
Much more fun than biochemistry lab. Much more fun than sitting on a chair in front of a screen.
If I hadn't been sick (unknown food allergies and bacteria infection in a tooth, both of which made me tired), I might be a chemist today. I got through the course but had to quit later.
Edit: I might add -- my present back problems from sitting in front of a screen for decades might force me to an unpleasant/dangerous operation in ten years.
Edit 2: Half the reason I liked Org Chem was probably that the subject had to do with reality, it was such fun after just studying/working with totally abstract concepts my whole life.
It was the worst executed Coursera class I have taken. The lectures contained only the bare bones of the theory and almost no examples, and there was lots of difficult homework (of the sort the NYT article describes). Even if they would want us to have no theoretical foundation, and just generalize from examples (like the NYT article suggests), they should have told us that that is the M.O. of the course, and then actually give us a large number of examples to stare at.
Of course intro level organic chemistry is no secret knowledge, and there are good textbooks, but what's the point of an online course (or real university course lectures), if just reading a proper textbook would be more beneficial.
Any subject can be transformed into a difficult course by teaching too little theory, and then giving too advanced homework.
I wonder why people can get away with saying stuff like this without evidence. I'd be inclined to think that the diagnosis boosting from orgo is minor at best and the time used would be far better spent actually learning to make diagnoses.
I give that there could be some synergy effects, but I highly doubt there are strong enough that it's better to study orgo rather than what is actually being applied.
Ignoring the specifics about Organic Chemistry, this skill, relying on intuition and generalizing from specific examples, is the skill of Pattern Recognition.
Regardless of the subject, you can't memorize all of the possible permutations and combinations, but you can start to get a feel for the patterns and begin to recognize them. Then when you encounter something new, you can recognize the pattern, or enough of the pattern to have a place to start.
Think about things you do on a day-to-day basis and how you react to a new situation. You just signed up for a new service and you get your first bill in the mail - you've never seen this bill, but it fits the pattern of every other service you use and you already know how to pay it. Now apply that same concept to something more complex than paying a bill.
I'd love to see a course like this in every field of study since pattern recognition is a skill that everyone has but so few seem to do really well.
My girlfriend is a bio major and we have talked for hours about the pain and crushing defeat that org-chem can bring. I always likened it to calculus for me, since math has always been my weak point, but I never had a calculus exam that made me feel the way org-chem seems to make some students feel.
Also major respect to the author. Making that kind of career change in your 40's has to be difficult. I wish her the best of luck.
The introductory orgo classes I took early in college were heavy on reaction mechanisms, molecular orbital theory, and intuition and light on memorizing bucket-loads of reactions, and it ended up giving me and my classmates a much better grasp of the material than students from other schools. Many of us ended up breezing through our university's graduate courses in organic chemistry while graduate students from other universities struggled painfully through the same courses. I suspect that it's part of the reason it was the top organic chemistry program in the world.
That said, p-chem (physical chemistry) was a lot harder ;-).
He was the hardest grader of any professor I ever had. He gave (partial) negative points for an incorrect answer on tests. I had friends who ended up with negative scores on their tests. The class average score was in the 30% range. I had one friend who managed to get every single question wrong on a 20 question true false section, which to this day still amazes me. Luckily it was on a curve, or he would have failed us all.
Eventually, I gave up trying to understand p-chem, and concentrated on just learning his very strange test style. That turned out to be a fantastic decision for my grade. I got the high score in the class on the last test and the final, which got my grade up from a B- to an A-. The downside was I never really learned p-chem ;-).
I had a professor in calculus. His tests were multiple-choice, with 1.0 for correct and -0.25 for every wrong answer. So even if you answered _nothing_, you would get a 0.
The average in his exams used to be -1.5 or so. You made an "A" if you got > 2.5 out of 15.0
However stuff like advanced mathematics is completely beyong my comprehension.
The mental part of planning a synthesis is a lot like programming. The differences are: parts (i.e. reactions) are less interchangeable, and when you actually make the stuff, you get diminishing returns, "recompile" is not as trivial a task.
Synthetic biology is a lot closer, since you can copy DNA at will, and while editing is not as simple as spinning up an instance of vi, "recompile" is a whole heck of a lot easier.
good luck--grade grubbers!
By the way, I always felt the difference between A students and B students was a lot of ass kissing--at many colleges.