“Sometimes people take CHEM 233 and like organic chemistry. Sometimes people take CHEM 233 and never want to hear about organic chemistry again.”
— Professor Jay Wickenden
Let me introduce you to my least favourite course and my current lowest course mark: CHEM 233.
It’s funny. I hear a lot of people say things like, “This course wasn’t as bad as I was told.” and “People said this course would be super hard, but I thought it was fine?”
You know what I don’t hear? People actually saying that the course is difficult…
I’m not sure what you’ve heard about this course, if you’ve heard anything at all, but I definitely found this course difficult. Many of my friends will tell you otherwise… apparently, this was their favourite course. I don’t know. I think they’re all crazy.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a Science One alumna, and I learned practically nothing from organic chemistry. Thus, I went into second year organic chemistry without the expected background knowledge from first year. Don’t be me!
To start: A good professor is absolutely paramount!
I usually like to start with the course breakdown, but I cannot stress this point enough: The professor can really make or break a course— especially organic chemistry. There were 4 different professors teaching in my year. One of the professors had an 80% average, and another had a 65% average. That’s a 15% difference!
(Of course, correlation ≠ causation, and sure, perhaps all of the smart students happened to choose the same section, thus resulting in a higher average. Even if that’s the case, however, I think you’re still best off choosing the section with the higher average because then you’d be surrounded with other bright people!)
Unfortunately, we didn’t get informed of the professors prior to the start of the course, so it was all luck of the draw. I highly recommend Jay Wickenden and Jason Hein if you get the choice. They are both amazing at their job!
I, unfortunately, ended up with one of the professors who had a lower class average. I won’t point fingers, but be sure to do research on your professor. If you end up with a below-average professor, the best advice I can give you is to attend another section.
With the exception of quiz days, there’s nothing stopping you from simply attending a different section’s lecture… there were no iClicker questions for my section, so I quickly began skipping classes and attending another section instead. The difference is astounding!
I went through first year thinking that I was absolutely doomed for organic chemistry. While it is true that I’m not the best at organic chemistry, everything made so much more sense after I had the experience of attending a good professor’s lectures.
However, you might fall into a particularly unfortunate case where you cannot attend another professor’s lecture due to scheduling conflicts. In this case: good luck! The other professors’ materials are posted on Canvas, so I encourage you to take a look. You’ll likely need to do a lot of self-studying which is not ideal for a course like organic chemistry. Make good use of Khan Academy and YouTube!
Course Breakdown
20% Midterm 1
20% Midterm 2
45% Final
8% Homework Assignments
7% Section Specific
Midterms and Final
85% of your mark is quite a lot! No pressure! I did terribly (~72%) on the first midterm for a number of reasons… one of them being that I forgot to eat before it, another being that I didn’t study nearly enough. Most of my mistakes came from dumb things that I should’ve known the answer to: I really beat myself up after this midterm. I still have negative feelings about it.
So my first pro-tip to you is to eat something before your exam. Don’t stuff yourself silly to the point where you get tired and want to take a nap— but do remember to eat. Though, it’s unlikely that you’ll forget; I think this is a niche problem that I have.
Secondly, check over your answers. I’m not sure why you wouldn’t, but I was feeling a bit lightheaded and faint during my midterm so in my daze, I decided that I’d just trust my first answers. Bad idea.
Most importantly, however, is that you do all of the problem sets and the practice exams. Additionally, all sections’ professors posted their quizzes on Canvas (after the quiz was done in-class, of course), so those are also good practice! I didn’t bother with the textbook questions or the readings.
I spent many hours grinding out practice problems and exams, and did significantly better on midterm 2. You definitely need to know your mechanisms inside out. Look at Jay Wickenden’s slides, regardless if you’re in his class or not, and recite every mechanism until you’ve got them memorized. You also need to memorize pKa values provided in the course, and your nucleophiles and electrophiles.
There was a surprising amount of memorization in this course. Nothing too insane, but still more than expected!
Homework Assignments
There were a total of 10 homework assignments. These were weekly, with a few exceptions (ie. if there was an upcoming midterm). Only our best 8 homework marks counted, and made up 8% of our mark. You can do the math to deduce that each assignment is worth 1%! The assignments aren’t too long— they’re all one page double sided. They usually contain a mix of multiple choice, predict-the-products, and mechanism questions.
Section Specific
They call it “section specific,” but almost all sections were the same: 6% from quizzes, and 1% from iClicker participation.
However, if you’ve been reading this post carefully, you might recall me mentioning that there were no participation marks for my section. Indeed, I think my professor was the only one who decided not to have iClicker participation marks. Our quizzes were instead weighted 7%.
Anyway, regardless of your section, there were (supposed to be) 3 in-class quizzes. (Our year was a bit special because of the whole bus strike ordeal; our third quiz ended up being online.) The lowest quiz mark was dropped, so each quiz was worth either 3% or 3.5% depending on which professor you had. The quizzes differed between each section, so there was a bit of concern amongst students about differences in difficulty of quizzes. We were told that the marks would be scaled if deemed necessarily. The section that had a 65% average tended to, in my opinion, get more difficult quizzes. While I wasn’t in their section, I looked over their quizzes during my studies and found them to be tricky.
Final Thoughts
I hate organic chemistry and I never want to take this course again. However, with practice, patience, and a whole lot of frustration, it is possible to succeed in this course, even if you’re like me and enter the course not understanding resonance. I still think that I could’ve done significantly better, had I not performed so poorly on my first midterm. What is done is done, however, and I hope that you have better luck in this course than me!
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