CHEM 1410

I would recommend taking this course with another teacher. Professor Morkowchuk is a great teacher who explains ideas and concepts fairly well, BUT she has very challenging exams and if you do poorly on the exams then it does not matter how good of a teacher she is. If you are in her class just know you will have to study a little harder but its chem what else do you expect!

Lisa is purely awful. It was a mistake to take her as a first year entering UVA, as she will absolutely destroy your confidence in doing well in this class. She teaches using poorly written out notes on a scrap of paper and projects them on a screen, which sometimes makes it impossible to learn if you find her handwriting to be seriously illegible (which I did).

She makes chemistry seem like the easiest thing in the world, until you take her exams which are ridiculously difficult and high-stakes. A majority of the material she tested was talked about for 2-3 minutes in class, while the rest that WASN'T tested took up 95% of her lecture time. She prides herself in weeding out students of their hopes and desires in science, as it is her job to make us supremely miserable. Her office hours were completely inaccessible to me, and she gave the worst explanations in her e-mails. I asked her to clarify a simple concept, and she gave me something that confused me even more. I asked for a follow-up... no response. She is the sole reason why my GPA is noticeably lower than it should be.

I wouldn't diss on a professor so much if he/she was passionate and inspiring yet is a hard grader by nature, but Lisa comes to class everyday held up by some cheap coffee while squeaking in a monotone, annoying, high-pitched voice and teaches the class with absolutely no enthusiasm at all. If you want to learn actual material, get a good grade, and not ending up dreading chem, take it with Columbus or Welch.

Lisa's a nice professor and I found her lectures to be pretty easy to follow - she writes down notes on an overheard projector while lecturing and posts them afterwards. This makes it pretty easy to look back at her notes at a later date. There's clicker questions for some easy participation points every lectures and a mini-quiz every Friday. She's super understanding and really loves her job. The cons of her class are the exams and the TAs. Her averages for the exams are around a high C and the exams have little room for error. Personally, I thought the exams were quite hard and the questions on them were vague. You usually have to do some sifting through the TAs before you find one that's knowledgeable AND good at explaining things.

you either like lisa's teaching style a lot or you absolutely hate her. if youre someone who never took ap chem in high school, kinda suck at science in general, and have no choice but to take lisa's section and are worried like i was, i hope this review helps!!! LECTURE STYLE: writes notes out with you instead of using slides, so for slower paced learners/ppl who never read the textbook like me lmao this is a Good Thing (tip: she smtimes says important things and not write them down so MAKE SURE u take notes on things she says as side notes bc theyre usually important to kno anyway/help you understand concepts better). a lot of ppl have problems w her lecturing bc she sometimes explains in a way that isnt exactly scientific or generalizes which can throw you off if u dont get her point. this is probably why some ppl find her lectures misleadingly easy but this is where the textbook reading comes in: i literally never read before class bc she teaches u the main ideas in lecture BUT for those topics you feel like lisa didnt explain well, find the section in the text and read it to supplement lecture info. i found this "reading after lecture" strategy really helped with understanding concepts and doing hw. HW: weekly mastering chem assignments that can range from taking like 1hr to 5hrs depending on how many annoyingly complex and mathy problems she assigns. i had to look up a lot of these for outside help, but understanding these involved ones really do prepare u for some of her harder exam problems. also i rly recommend splitting the assignments in half between 2 days if u dont wanna be sitting there and doing it all in one go cos that rly just drains u and willl ruin ur friday if u leave hw til the day its due.
ASSESSMENTS: she gives weekly mini-quizzes in the beginning of friday lecture which can be challenging if u dont know the material well by then. she'll also always quiz on topics covered the week before, this usually lines up with the mastering hw, so i recommend finishing mastering thursday night if u can. she'll drop ur 3 lowest quizzes at the end of the year, and quiz questions r examples of the depth of understanding she expects on exams so listen 2 her explain the answers (tip for ppl who are always late to class: i have found u can consistently be up to 4-5 min late to her class everyday before u start missing new content/the start of the mini-quiz, so try not to b too late on fridays unless u decide to take an L on that week's quiz). for exams, there are 3 midterms, 1 cummulative final, usually a mix of multiple choice, short answer, fill in the blank, and they are definitely hard. theyre not many points/questions so missing more than a few will hurt u, like her exams suck lmao cos shes really testing to see if u have deep understanding. when doing practice exams, focus on the more recent ones. she rarely curves. if youre a crammer, make sure the night before the exam u clear the day cos u will want to dedicate a lot of time to studying i promise. ABOUT LISA: she clearly loves the material, nice lady, and REALLY wants her students to do well. her office hrs might be inconvenient bc they tend to be morning hrs, but if u go to them, she answers questions really well and gives good strategy tips. emailing correspondence experience with her has also been pretty good, she'll answer your questions literally the day of an exam if she has time, and if you cant make office hrs but desperately need help, she will make time to meet with you 1-on-1 and schedules them so you get a full hour with her which is rly nice.
overall, doing well in lisa's class is challenging and can be time-consuming if you're not the strongest in chem/science but its doable if you utilize her resources and rly take time to learn the material. she's a good teacher for slower learners (as opposed to welch who is fast lecturer), and sets u up well for long term learning which is good if ur on a track w higher level chem!!! good luck !

After surviving Lisa's class for a semester, I can say that, without a doubt, Lisa gets a lot of unfair reviews. The homework is NOT overbearing, the weekly quizzes are NOT hard, and the tests ARE fair. If you go to lecture and pay attention, even if you did not take AP Chem in high school (which I did not), this class is completely passable. I overloaded on credits and still managed to get a B in the class. The reason why I think Lisa gets such poor reviews is because some salty premed majors got destroyed and now their med-school dreams are crushed. Cry me a river. If you put in the time for this class, it seems like it would be very easy to get an A, just do the work. It may not be exciting or glamorous, and it may not be fun, but I sure learned quite a bit. For most of this semester, I heavily bought into the idea that somehow my poor performance in the class was a result of Lisa being a bad prof, but she really isn't. I believe Lisa was probably one of the better instructors I had this semester, and I don't think it's fair to say that she's a bad prof simply because her class averages are C+'s on every test. If you actually try in this class, you being a student who is at least slightly above average intelligence, you have every ability to get an A in this class even if you're a premed doing this for the requirement. It won't be easy, but it'll be doable.

Lisa is a great professor. Her lectures are very clear, organized, and perfectly paced. All I needed to do was aim my eyes at the notes and I understood the material. I came from a high school where AP classes were not an option and I was taught that the earth was 6000 years old and climate change was a myth and I still got an A easily in this class. The only prerequisites for success in this class are an understanding of basic high school math and a desire to learn Chemistry. I've seen people say that they don't like the weight of the quizzes: These are the people who only ever came to class on Fridays when the quizzes took place and left midway through class when they were complete. If you are in class and take notes, the quizzes are super easy. The midterms are difficult, but that's because it's a difficult subject. If I made a list of the top 10 hardest exams I've taken so far at UVa, none of the four exams I took in this class would even be considered to make the list. So study and get good now because it sure is not getting any easier in future classes.

This review is more for those of you taking CHEM 1410 over the summer. The summer course with Lisa was amazing! Lisa is very approachable and she has office hours everyday. She is understanding and realizes that taking Chem over the summer is brutal, so she tries to make the exams easier. Most people either approve of or dislike Lisa's teaching style. I preferred Lisa's teaching style as she would practically write out your notes for you regarding the concepts that were being learned. Over the summer you pretty much have homework every single day (about 25-30 questions on average) and there are quizzes on Mondays and Wednesdays and exams every Friday. This is your typical summer crash course where you need to stay on top of lecture notes, homework, and readings. Overall, it was very doable so long as you put in the time and effort.

Lisa taught two sections of CHEM 1410 this semester. One of them is taught traditionally, with lectures and a discussion, and the other section has only one lecture a week, plus an "Expo" section, which is essentially groupwork without instruction. This review is on the nontraditional Expo section of the class. Overall, this class was a disgrace to the subject of chemistry. The format is absolutely terrible. The textbook is on the online platform, TopHat, and was written by the professors, as far as I know. It is riddled with typos and is glitchy. The homework is embedded in the reading, and needs to be completed BEFORE you even attend lecture, so nothing makes sense while you are completing the homework. Lecture is pretty generic, and is the only part of the class that is not an absolute disgrace, except for the fact that lectures are not consistent throughout all sections of this class. Expo section might be the worst run class ever. You work in groups to figure out problems that you haven't learned the content necessary to answers, and professors Welch and Morkowchuk just sort of mill around the whole time. Exams cover material that hasn't been discussed in class, and half of the exam is in groups, so basically you are being graded on the knowledge of other people. If you are taking Chem 1410, do NOT take the TopHat/Expo section, take the traditional lecture, and save yourself from the disgrace that is this class. Chemistry is not a hard subject, and yet somehow this class has made it impossible to comprehend. The professors are clearly trying to implement some sort of newfangled 21st century learning strategy here, which is not working at all. There is a reason that classes are generally taught in lecture format, and not by self- teaching. I'm paying 48k a year in tuition for professors to teach me, not to teach myself. @ the entire Chem 1410 faculty: do better.

Prof Morkowchuk is super nice and approachable, but her lectures are really boring and she mostly just goes over examples rather than the actual concept. The expos weren't helpful and completely unrelated to what we were learning and if you ask a TA for help they won't know the answer either. If you want to understand anything in the class you're gonna need to go to office hours all the time. Not a huge workload though which was a plus, but I guess having to go to office hours everyday evened that out.

I had Lisa for a traditional chem lecture / discussion format. Bad reviews scared me but I truly don't understand the negative opinions of her. It was a pretty straightforward lecture of notetaking, Mastering Chemistry homework was challenging but useful for learning, and exams were fine, not too bad if you study. I recommend Lisa.