dope class. have fun kids

This class is tough, but not as bad as people say. Hit the ground running the first day, and don't half ass your work. You WILL get what you put in.

Hunt's lecture's were more entertaining this semester. Work out the mechanism before class and try to understand what each reagent does - not only does this make understanding the material easier, you'll have to do less studying/reviewing in the long run.

Mike's a life saver. Miss a lecture? Count on Mike. Couldn't work ahead and felt lost during lecture? Ask Mike. But don't waste people's time by asking mundane or stupid questions - try to think for yourself.

The final's tough. Good luck.

Hunt is a terrible professor. I'm pretty confident that he bases the entire semester grade on the final exam (even though he says it's a mixture of rankings/your final exam score). To get an A on the final exam this past semester, you needed to get a 36/50. To get a B, you needed to get a 30/50. Sounds easy, right? No.
It's impossible to get an A if you don't go to Mike's recitations. Mike's a great teacher, but even he can't prepare you for the utterly stupid questions that appear on the final exam.

Take this in the summer unless you've already taken other premed courses in the summer... this class will take up all your time and suck the life out of you... or you won't get a good grade... or BOTH!

If you want to do well in this class, you had better make it your full-time job. What you do during the lab hour matters very little. Your performance on the lab reports and postlab questions rank you within you 10-15 person lab section. Your lab section's collective grades on the final determine how many As, A-s, B+, etc. the lab section has earned. The final is one of the most notoriously hard finals in the college. You are required to memorize every mechanism for every experiment completed during the year so you can identify obscure resonance structures and intermediates. Do not take this class if you can help it.

This class is really hard, but required for pre-meds. It is not about how well you are doing in orgo lecture, but rather how well you can apply those concepts and write about them in the weekly lab report. I thought some of the experiments were kind of fun compared to gen chem lab, but they take a long time and can sometimes result in no yield, which is very frustrating. This class is a marathon, not a sprint, do son't fall behind or lose motivation or else your grade will suffer.

This course is definitely not easy. Be prepared for this to take up your entire life. In order to get a decent grade, you need to attend pretty much everything: lab lecture, recitation, and office hours. Even then, your grade is on a curve so you can still get a bad grade even though you were ranked decently high in your section. A good grade is pretty much determined by the final. Tom Dawson wasn't very helpful, nice guy, but you can also attend other office hours which may be more useful.

This class is tough, but not as hard as people say. For lab you go in and perform an experiment and then you have to write up a lab report explaining the theory and your results. If you write a good report, these end up being about 4 pages single-spaced. It sounds daunting, but there's a review session every week led by a TA and he goes through everything you need to know. The material isn't that tough to grasp, the tedious part is synthesizing all of it into a report. I would also recommend a recorder for these.

Most people are confused with how the grading works, so I'll break it down for you. Basically everybody in the lab is divided into lab sections of 15 people headed by a different TA. The TA grades your lab reports, lab notebook, post-labs (basically a worksheet with a few questions on the lab you just did), and whatever else; this past semester we had random quizzes during lab. You're then given a rank in the lab, but being #1 in your section doesn't guarantee an A+. The final exam serves two purposes: it re-ranks you within your section (if you were #1 and flunked the final chances are your rank's gonna drop) and it determines what kind of letter grades will be assigned to your section. Your section's performance on the final is compared to how well other sections did. Sections who did well on the final will have better letter grades assigned to their section, so if your section had 3 "A's" assigned to it, then the top three ranked people would get those A's, and so on.

That being said, the lab reports, pre-lab notebook entries, and post-labs took me anywhere from 8-10 hours a week to finish. Take that with a grain of salt though, because I'm kind of a perfectionist and was really nitpicky about my stuff. It's an endurance contest, because grinding out a report like that every week wears you down, and in the end I think it's whoever puts in the time that'll get that #1 rank and that A+. So just don't get lazy, as cliche as that may sound. Get those reports out of the way as soon as you can, because writing a report the night before is crazy.

As far as the final is concerned, go through the postlabs and write down all the mechanisms over and over. There can be some slight variations on how each mechanism is written (little things like proton transfers, etc.) which got frustrating, and Hunt likes to throw in answer choices like "A+B" "B+C" "All of the Above". Just do the practice final in the back of the lab manual to get a feel for these kinds of questions.

Spend lots of time studying and writing lab reports, they help when it comes to the final. which isn't impossible. just understand everything and Hunt is helpful if you go to him

Spend A LOT of time doing the post lab questions and lab reports. Go to lectures and make sure you understand each step of the lab/reaction mechanisms. If you're the top of your lab group, you'll probably get an A in the class.