CHEM10003: Chemistry 1

Exam 74%, 3x 2% Mid Semester Tests, 20% practicals, 3 Independent Learning Tasks (not worth anything but are a hurdle)

the mid semester tests consisted of approx. 10 multiple choice questions that were aimed at seeing how well you understood the content from the lectures.

Practicals: These were not terrible, however they didn’t really interact too much with the lectures and some of the pracs involved listening and copying what the demonstrator said, rather than learning anything. Overall, they are not difficult, just follow what the lab manual says as well as the demonstrator (as they mark your work) and you will be fine

Exam: A 74% exam can be quite daunting, however if you consistently prepare and study for the subject, you should be able to have a sound knowledge of the content by exam time. You will have to remember the atomic numbers the first 30 or so elements, however the lecturers did give tips on what they expected us to know (it was mainly Brendan, who more wanted us to know the groups so that we could apply trends)

I loved this subject. It was extremely stimulating and the content was taught extremely well. The administration side was also run fantastically, with clear communication of what was required of us (such as assessments opening).

I found that lecturers responded extremely quickly (sometimes less than an hour).

Yes, with screen capture

Mark Rizzacasa, Uta Wille, Muthupandian Ashokumar (Ashok), Paul Mulvaney, Brendan Abrahams

All lecturers were extremely professional in their teaching, and the content was delivered to an exemplary standard.

Mark: Mark took the first two weeks of organic. The content is covered very thoroughly, however he does talk very fast and it was quite a shock during my first chemistry lecture.

Uta: Uta finished the organic topic. Her lectures were quite engaging and humorous. She did make mistakes throughout the two weeks but they were quickly corrected.

Ashok: Ashok took us for gases and equilibrium. Most of his lecture content was for interest only (not examinable). He did an excellent job showing us how different equations were derived (such as ideal gas law). This allowed a much better understanding of these formulas, especially the units. However, he was extremely hard to understand at times due to his quiet voice.

Paul: Paul gave the lectures on thermodynamics. They were easily the worst of the lost. He spoke in a monotone for the entire 5 lectures and was not very engaging (but I feel that anyone who tried to teach the topic would be the same). He was very thorough in his lectures, but at times it felt that he didn’t cover the basics, instead jumping straight into the more complex stuff. It also didn’t help that we only had 5 lectures instead of 6 so some content had to be cut down. His lecture notes did have thorough examples, complete with working out (he doesn’t explain them in his lectures). Although I say that they were the worst, they were still quite good, this just shows the quality of the chemistry department in their teaching standards.

Brendan: Brendan took the entire 4 weeks of inorganic chemistry and did a really great job. He was very visual in the lectures. The content was delivered at a nice pace. The structure of solids, the last section taught, can be quite challenging, however tutorials should take care of any problems. His expectations of the cohort were quite reasonable.

Tutorials: I found the tutorials to be extremely helpful throughout the entire semester, especially for the physical (thermodynamics) and structure of solids. For the organic section I had Chris Donner, who did a really good job, especially with the visualisation aspect. For the rest of the semester I had Sonia (the coordinator) who was absolutely amazing, by far the best tutor I have seen across any subject. She just has this ability to explain difficult concepts in minimal words, I highly recommend attending her tutorials (or Penny) if you can.

Extra help: There are extra help sessions available throughout the semester, usually a couple hours a week. These are great if you want to sit down with a tutor (or a lecturer if you’re lucky) and discuss a specific question or concept. Sometimes Sonia (and Penny) can be found in there, which is brilliant to be able to get one on one help from either of these two.

Molecular model kit: You are allowed to bring this into the exam. In my opinion it is a must for most people. I was able to visualise a lot of the organic content but it is much better to be able to physically model it (especially in a stressful exam).

Yes, previous 5 years, with answers (except previous year, where students provide their own answers)

5 Out of 5

Chemistry 3 (not necessary, lecturers actually recommend other textbooks anyway)

3x 1 hour lecture per week, 1x 1 hour tutorial per week (weeks 2-12), 6x 3 hour practicals throughout the semester

Semester 1 2017

(Optional) H1 92

Okay so, this has to be the worstly taught subject that I’ve taken this year. It wasn’t too bad, but after doing fundamentals in semester 1, I think there’s a lot to improve in this subject. This may be because I did this subject in semester 2. My friends who did this subject in semester 1 didn’t have the same problems with this subject as I did.

Yes, with screen capture. However, some lecturers like to write on the document camera which doesn’t appear in the lecture capture. The organic lecturer also brought in models which once again wasn’t captured.

Lectures 1 - 12 (Organic Chemistry): Associate Professor Craig Hutton
Lecture 1-5: Structure and Bonding of Alkanes (sp3 Hybridisation)
Lecture 6-7: Structure and Bonding of Alkenes (sp2 Hybridisation)
Lecture 8: Benzene and its derivatives
Lecture 9: Structure and Bonding of Alkynes (sp hybridisation)
Lecture 10: Functional Groups
Lecture 11-12: Spectroscopy and Determination of Structure

Lectures 13 - 18 (Physical Chemistry): Professor Muthupandian Ashokkumar
Lecture 12-14: Gases
Lecture 15-18: Energy and Thermochemistry

Lectures 19 - 24 (Physical Chemistry): Professor Peter Tregloan
Lecture 19-21: Spontaneity, Entropy and Free Energy
Lecture 22-24: Chemical Equilibrium

Lectures 25 - 30 (Inorganic Chemistry): Associate Professor David McFadyen
Lecture 25-26: Acids and Bases
Lecture 27: Trends in the Periodic Table
Lecture 28-30: Molecular Structure and Bonding (Lewis structures, Formal charge, Resonance, VSEPR – predicting the shapes of molecules, Polarity of molecules, Covalent Bonding, Valence bond theory)

Lecture 31 – 36 (Inorganic Chemistry): Dr Chris Ritchie
Lecture 31: Molecular Structure and Bonding cont… (Molecular orbital theory, Intermolecular forces)
Lecture 32: Ionic Compounds and their Solutions
Lecture 33-34: Structures of Solids
Lecture 35-36: Main Group Chemistry

You’ll have 6 practicals throughout the semester. They aren’t evenly distributed (I had 2 in the last 2 weeks of the semester -.-). Each one is worth 3.33% so take them seriously. You have to complete a pre-lab (on chemical) before you go into the prac. You have to get 80% + to get a prelab receipt which you have to write down on a tear off slip in your prac manual. Some of these pre-labs are really annoying. You would get the answer wrong if you didn’t have the correct significant figures and if you didn’t answer the question they wanted you to answer it. Good thing is you can do the pre-lab as many times as you want before your prac. I think the pre-lab is worth 1 mark out of the 10 for the prac.

Depending on the prac, you’ll have different types of assessment. Sometimes you have to answer questions while at other times you have to hand something in. You also have to write up a report for each prac. Keep it concise and to the point and you should get the marks (have a look at your prac manual for how to write one up).

The key to the pracs is to be prepared. Understand what needs to be done. The questions that you have to answer are given in the prac manual, so make sure you know how to do them. Try starting the write up at home and if you can, answer some of the questions. This will ensure that you’ll finish the prac on time and maximise your marks.

Yes, a ton on the library website. Solutions for the past 3 exams were given on the LMS. Last years exam was given as an exam wiki on the LMS for everyone to contribute to. The answers were checked and explained in the exam revision lecture during SWOT vac.

3 Out of 5

A. Burrows, J. Holman, A. Parsons, G. Pilling and G. Price, Chemistry3 2nd Ed, Oxford University Press, 2013.

The textbook was extremely helpful for physical chemistry, I would highly recommend trying to get a copy for this section of the course. There were also prescribed questions from the textbook, which was useful in consolidating the information given in the lectures.

Apart from this, you also need (co-op prices given):

•3 x one hour lectures per week,
•6 x three hours of practical activities during semester,
•1 x one hour tutorial/workshop session per week,
•6 hours of computer aided learning during semester,
•8 hours of independent learning tasks during semester.
Estimated total time commitment of 170 hours

2014, Semester 2.

Midsemester test (5%), Prac work (20%), exam (75%)

This was a fairly enjoyable subject. The pracs were pretty easy to score very highly in, and are pretty much completely unrelated to what you do in lectures. There tends to be quite a lot to cover in the three hour blocks, and I was almost always pressed for time, but if you want, you can write up half of it at home (my demonstrator actually recommended this) which will pretty much eradicate any time problems. You also get to do some pretty cool shit in pracs, including making super shiny crystals (which my demonstrator wouldn’t let me keep :C ), and playing with liquid nitrogen (!!). There was also a preprac test to do online before every prac, which you needed to score above a certain mark on to be allowed to even go to the prac. Which was annoying because chemcal sucks. I had to do one of these tests like three times before I passed. =_____=;;

As for lectures, organic chem was taught really brilliantly; Mark Rizzacassa is an amazing lecturer and explains everything ridiculously well. He was also engaging, and has a good balance of humour and chemistry in his lectures. I don’t feel like there was too much chemistry to learn in the organic chem part of this subject though, it was mostly just nomenclature. It is important for you to be able to visualise molecules though. If you can’t, build some models with a modelling kit. (I think there may be some in the chemistry building you can play with). Infrared spectroscopy and NMR he went over pretty quickly, but we do it in much more detail in VCE anyways so it shouldn’t be a problem. He also writes a fair bit in his lectures, so you do need to go to or watch his lectures.

Prof Abrahams lectured for a bunch of lectures at the end of the semester. He wasn’t nearly as engaging as rizzacassa, but was just as wonderful if not better at explaining things. He covered a whole heap of stuff, including acids and bases (which was almost the same as VCE) and structures of solids, which I personally found really difficult to visualise, even after looking at models. The questions they ask for that topic are pretty straight forward though, and if you know the idea of what’s going on, not being able to see the exact lattices in your head won’t kill you. He also perfectly explained periodic trends, how to draw lewis structures, a tiny bit on molecular orbital theory, and there were a couple of lectures on some other bit and pieces also. His slides are brilliant also, and you can just learn everything off them, but I watched all his lectures at 1.8x speed anyways because I think it’d be silly to miss his great teaching.
Uta and Gus on the other hand I felt handled their topics quite poorly. Even now I still have no clue whatsoever what was going on in thermodynamics/entropy. Uta spent all her lectures trying to be funny and doing no chemistry/doing very lazy chemistry/not explaining things properly/not even going over half of what was on her slides. “Oh you can just read this at home, now sit while I make some more jokes”. =.= Thankfully, a bulk of what she taught came straight out of VCE (pretty much everything except thermodynamics). Gus had the unfortunate task of trying to teach a bunch of first years entropy, a topic that I imagine you need much more than six lectures on to get a semi-decent grasp of. He tried to make it easier to understand by simplifying it, but I did not see how I was meant to learn chemistry from listening to him flipping coins and watching videos backwards… His notes too I found were pretty unhelpful. In the end, I ended up just memorising a couple of formulas for entropy (and for some of enthalpy also actually) that I didn’t know the origins of (Gus was pretty much like “I’m not gonna explain where this comes from, just trust me that it works”) which was slightly annoying and most definitely not a good way to “learn”, but at this level, I don’t think much more can be done. From asking around/begging people to explain to me what was going on, and having no one know, I’m pretty sure this is what everyone else did also.

The midsemester test was something like 12 multiple choice questions on organic chem. It was a little annoying to do because it was online (and timed), and with organic chem especially, it’s nice to be able to draw on the paper/put marks on the molecule so that I don’t lose count of things. If I had been prepared, I would probably have printed the test, done it on the printout, and then filled the answers in online. Regardless, it’s again is pretty easy to do quite well on, and of course, since you’re doing it online, you have access to all your notes/google/whatever.
Tutes I barely went to because I was way too behind during the semester to know what was happening in them, but of the ones I did attend, I didn’t find them that useful/thought they were a pretty big waste of time. Depending on your tutor, you either sit in tables and work on questions, and then the tutor tells you the answers for them all, or the tutor stands up the top and just does all the questions on a take and you copy the solutions. I do think the tute questions were worth doing though, and I did them all in the last few weeks/swotvac, which was a good thing for me because it meant I could check my answers with ones that they post on the LMS at the end of the semester. If you’re keeping up to date, and want to do the tute questions, you probably will have to go to the tutes, because otherwise you won’t have any way to know if you’ve answered them correctly or not, unless you can get answers of a friend who does go or something like that.

I think I might be odd in thinking this but, Chemcal was something that I actually found quite helpful as well. It has the most annoying soft keyboard in the world which will actually drive you insane, and rounds everything off too soon so marks your correct answers wrong half the time, but if you have the will to deal with it, I found it had some good questions. It also rewards you with really bad puns/terrible encouragement pictures if you get everything in a little section correct. Also before every activity, it has little explanation which was good for summarising what was in lectures. Unfortunately. it doesn’t have very much on thermodynamics/entropy (the two topics that people seem to struggle with most OTL).

For those interested in cramming. I don’t recommend it, but definitely think that it’s possible to cram for this subject. Just make sure you do prepracs and submit the ILTs. I was a pretty slack student/had a lot going on with life this semester and stopped going to lectures/learning the content pretty much as soon as Uta started teaching (I went to one of her lectures) and did not start again until a little after Prof. Abrahams started teaching which I think was something like week 9. During swotvac, they appoint tutors to hang around the chem building, and you can ask them questions. I pretty much had one *try* explain to me all of entropy at once, though I didn’t really get what he was saying;;;; Prof. Abrahams also came along to a couple which was really nice, and he always had a ton of students asking him questions. Gus came to quite a few of them too because everyone hates entropy. Don’t leave it too late into swotvac though, cause a ton of students will be there with questions near the end of the week.

As for the exam, if you’ve done a couple of practise exams, you’ll realise that they’re all almost exactly the same. It’s not VCE anymore, they’re not there to trick you, or to painfully separate people. They just want to test to see if you know what they want you to know. So have a look at a couple of papers, see what you need to know, and make sure you know it all. Oh BUT, you don’t get a fucking periodic table. o_____o I cannot possibly imagine their reasoning behind not providing one. I figure knowing where things are should eventually come naturally, but forcing us all to memorise where elements are, and having students who understand concepts fine not be able to answer questions because they can’t remember the order of two elements in a question about size or something is just annoying. Also there’s no conversion chart, and you will need to know the conversion between things like nano and pico and milli and whatever. So learn that also. I was lucky enough to guess the right factor on the exam. XD;;

Yes, with screen capture

Mark Rizzacassa, Uta Willie, Gus Grey Weale, Brendan Abrahams

Yes, a ton.

4 Out of 5

Don’t buy the textbooks. If you don’t like your money, feel free to donate it to me instead. I tried looking at Zumdahl a couple of times for topics I found difficult, but it left me even more confused. =.=;; They do have extra questions though if you’re eager to do more work. You *may* like to get a molecular modelling kit for organic chem if you struggle to visualise some of the molecules, but for $60, I don’t think it’s worth it. Just grab a bunch of pens and awkwardly try to hold them into a shape that vaguely represents what you want. :’D For pracs you will need to get the prac book (some demonstrators will also insist that you write reports in a duplicate notebook, most won’t). You’ll also need a labcoat, safety glasses and shoes that cover your entire foot if you haven’t any (preferably without heels, unless you’re me and don’t mind having the OH&S guys get mad at you every time). I bought the tute book as well which isn’t completely necessary, but it does have questions that you may like to do.

3x1hr lectures per week, 6 pracs, 3 ILTs

2012, semester 1

H1 (91)

Stereogenic centres (mirror image molecules) / Geometric nomenclature (naming alkenes) / Understanding bonding and applications of understanding bonding

is almost the same but is more physics based; if you've done physics, you'll have a laugh here. If you hate physics, it'll take some study.

is entirely new and is more of a headfuck than anything introduced in VCE. It's to do with equilibrium constants and how people came to them in the first place, and is heavily based around energy. Good luck to anyone who hasn't done VCE physics because I wholeheartedly believed it helped a lot.

expanded which will likely be the foundation for a lot of the stuff in Chemistry 2.

Now tutorials are not compulsory and I found them useless. You can teach yourself the same and more than you would learn in a 1 hour tutorial using YouTube in 30minutes and have a far more fundamental understanding of it. Sure, they work through problems, and by all means they teach one or two problems. However the person delivering the tutorial won't have time to get around to your problems; he'll stand at the front and deliver a lecture to a smaller group of people than a regular lecture and you won't be able to ask what you need to ask. If you have problems, EMAIL the people in the Chemistry department; they actually get back to you and are incredibly flexible with organising times. I also therefore recommend against buying the "compulsory" tutorial book. I didn't touch mine and wasted all that money on it.

By all means, minus the tutorials, this subject was incredibly enjoyable, the pracs interesting (liquid nitrogen, c'mon! Even polyiodide salts and synthesis of aspirin from 4-aminophenol is damn fucking interesting), and the lecturers clear.
P.S. The better you are at converting between units of magnitude (i.e. nanolitres to kilograms with a given density in the units tonnes per microlitre), the more prepared you'll be for the exam. It's something that you should start doing on your holidays before coming to UoM and taking Chemistry 1, because they always drop a few direct conversion questions on the exam.

A 30-minute on-line mid-semester test (5%); ongoing assessment of practical work (20%); a 3-hour written examination in the examination period (75%). Satisfactory completion of practical work is necessary to pass the subject. Independent learning tasks need to be completed in order to pass the subject.

What a brilliant subject. Straight up, I have to commend this for being the best structured, easiest to follow subject. They have ~1,500 kids in the course which they need to look after, set up timetable pracs, and essentially make the course work for, and you know what? They pull it off with aplomb, much better than the Biology department, which had emails running amok, impromptu assignment boxes, and objectively ambiguous instructions for a slightly smaller and more managable amount of students.

Ok so basically I assume that the only reason anyone would pick this is because it's a pre-requisite for anything, and the only people who would consider picking this would be VCE students/UoM entrants who simply want to know what the course covers. As far as I know, you don't pick Chemistry to complement your other subjects in the same way that you might pick Calculus or Data Analysis to do so, with the only exception coming to mind being Biology. I therefore think that people wouldn't choose Chemistry on a whim; I can only imagine that someone who picks Chemistry would study it in it's own right and plan to major in a Chemistry discipline, or perhaps for a Biology discipline. For those reaons I'm not going to do a pros/cons of picking Chemistry - you either will or you won't, depending on what you want your course to do. Rather, I'll just explain what's taught.

Not sure, never used it

Too many to list/remember, but this course is run REALLY well, and none of the lecturers were bad. The department is efficient and pragmatic in their operation of Chem 1.

Yes, ample past exams, 2 per year dating back to ~2004. There is so much revision work that it is an effort to complete it all in the run-up to the exams, so start before SWOTVAC (pre-exam study break)

5 of 5

2x Textbooks are recommended, one for Regular Chem and one for Organic Chem. The Organic Chem textbook honestly isn't needed, but "Chemical Principles" by Zumdahl is really very useful. I would recommend buying at the very least an outdated version of Zumdahl (I can testify that they are all the same in content) because there are so many small, pedantic things that you need to study that aren't covered extensively in lectures, such as Molecular Orbital Theory and particular calculations involving Buffer Solutions

6x 3hr Chemistry Practicals (scattered throughout the semester) and 3x Weekly 1hr Lecture and 1x Weekly 1hr Tutorial

2012, Semester 1

1. Organic Chemistry (Less on the reactions/polymerisation side of things, and more into understanding molecules in 3D. You'll cover a bit more nomenclature relating to alkenes, a new type of nomenclature relating to stereogenic molecules, and you'll cover (although still introductory material in the world of Chemistry) a LOT more detail into atomic orbitals than you could have ever imagined yourself doing, much less understanding in first year Chemistry)
2. Thermodynamics from VCE level with a physics based understanding (more on predicting whether a reaction will be exothermic/endothermic, rather than just using the informations that it is or isn't)
3. Entropy (understanding where Equilibrium Constants come from; objectively the hardest part of the course. This deals with WHY endothermic reactions CAN be spontaneous, even though VCE says 'generally, they won't be, but there's some exceptions'. This is where fundamental understanding is critical to answering exam questions correctly. There are two approaches here; the first is to memorise all the formulae and learn how to apply them with no inherent understanding of what is happening, or alternatively blow your brains out trying to understand how probability applies to atomic particles in the three different states and using your knowledge of (primarily real/ideal gases) to figure out a lot of crazy conceptual stuff intuitively
4. A whole heap of arbitrary shit relating to Chemistry 1/2 (Electronegativity, Sizes of atoms/ions, Acids and Bases including pH/pOH and Buffers {what is simple in VCE becomes rather challenging}, Metallic Character, and the new stuff covers magnetism, certain chemicals (you're at an advantage if you studied the production of H3PO4 of H2SO4 in Unit 4) and their production, Structures of Ionic/Metallic Lattices (Very complicated)), and exceptions to the Octet rule (explains structures of molecules like PCl5 and XeF4)
In summary: You do all the same shit, but the new topics are:

H1 [80]