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Don't try this at home
Dec. 21st, 2005 06:19 pm
I took the weirdest gamble on my o-chem exam yesterday. I hadn't been to class since the midterm and knew absolutely nothing about reaction mechanisms, except for a little bit that I picked up through reading the background material for my labs.
Last week I went to a "final exam review session," where a grad student did tons of example questions, mostly on the aforementioned reaction mechanisms that I know nothing about. I didn't really learn anything, since it was being assumed that I already knew the basics of them.
I read through my prof's lecture notes (which are really good) and desperately tried to memorize stuff.
Problem is, these reaction mechanism thingies...it's like doing integrals or playing a musical instrument. To really know how to do them, you gotta practice, practice, practice. And I didn't have the time for that.
I looked through my prof's sample exam paper (he used to teach this class at Ohio State and he still has some of his old course websites up and you can see some of those sample exams there, just to see what I was up against) and went to bed at 6AM Tuesday morning, setting my alarm for 9AM.
I didn't wake up until 11AM. My exam was at 2, and I desperately wanted to go through the notes again. I only got through a quick peek, and still had no idea what was going on.
So now I'm writing the exam, it's out of 350 points since it's 35% of the course grade, and I'm freaking out because there are about 3 questions on the exam that are just "propose a reaction mechanism for _______" or "show how you might synthesize _______ from ________," and some pages of "draw the primary organic product of these reactions." I wrote down guesses for the latter, did the other manageable parts of the exam, and went back to stare at the reaction mechanism/synthesis questions.
And stared.
And stared.
Stared some more.
Read the questions again. There was one of these mechanism questions that was worth 25 points each, and two that were 15 points each.
Looked at the page with the 4 "name this compound" (IUPAC system) questions and the 1 "draw this compound" question.
"Name the following compounds (10 points each, total of 40 points):"
"Draw the following compound (10 points):"
Free points!?
I estimated how many points I had so far on the exam, assuming that about 70% of my guesses were correct (or something like that - I was being generous) and I got a total of about 220.
Passing this exam was not going to be a problem. Passing the course was not going to be a problem.
I attempted half of the 25-point mechanism question and left the remaining mechanism questions blank. And walked out 1 hour 45 min into a 3-hour exam (not that it was a really long exam anyway, 3 hours was way too much time).
The final grades were posted today before noon (wow). I really had been generous to myself in my estimate, I actually received 202 points on the exam (that's just below the mean, 213, and the median, 208).
So now I have a 71.2% in organic chem, but it's the letter grade that matters, and I don't know the conversion or scaling, and official letter grades haven't been posted yet.
Last week I went to a "final exam review session," where a grad student did tons of example questions, mostly on the aforementioned reaction mechanisms that I know nothing about. I didn't really learn anything, since it was being assumed that I already knew the basics of them.
I read through my prof's lecture notes (which are really good) and desperately tried to memorize stuff.
Problem is, these reaction mechanism thingies...it's like doing integrals or playing a musical instrument. To really know how to do them, you gotta practice, practice, practice. And I didn't have the time for that.
I looked through my prof's sample exam paper (he used to teach this class at Ohio State and he still has some of his old course websites up and you can see some of those sample exams there, just to see what I was up against) and went to bed at 6AM Tuesday morning, setting my alarm for 9AM.
I didn't wake up until 11AM. My exam was at 2, and I desperately wanted to go through the notes again. I only got through a quick peek, and still had no idea what was going on.
So now I'm writing the exam, it's out of 350 points since it's 35% of the course grade, and I'm freaking out because there are about 3 questions on the exam that are just "propose a reaction mechanism for _______" or "show how you might synthesize _______ from ________," and some pages of "draw the primary organic product of these reactions." I wrote down guesses for the latter, did the other manageable parts of the exam, and went back to stare at the reaction mechanism/synthesis questions.
And stared.
And stared.
Stared some more.
Read the questions again. There was one of these mechanism questions that was worth 25 points each, and two that were 15 points each.
Looked at the page with the 4 "name this compound" (IUPAC system) questions and the 1 "draw this compound" question.
"Name the following compounds (10 points each, total of 40 points):"
"Draw the following compound (10 points):"
Free points!?
I estimated how many points I had so far on the exam, assuming that about 70% of my guesses were correct (or something like that - I was being generous) and I got a total of about 220.
Passing this exam was not going to be a problem. Passing the course was not going to be a problem.
I attempted half of the 25-point mechanism question and left the remaining mechanism questions blank. And walked out 1 hour 45 min into a 3-hour exam (not that it was a really long exam anyway, 3 hours was way too much time).
The final grades were posted today before noon (wow). I really had been generous to myself in my estimate, I actually received 202 points on the exam (that's just below the mean, 213, and the median, 208).
So now I have a 71.2% in organic chem, but it's the letter grade that matters, and I don't know the conversion or scaling, and official letter grades haven't been posted yet.
