CHEM 1410

I personally enjoyed having Prof Morkowchuk for Chem 1410. Because of covid, all of the 1410 professors shared the burden of recording lectures, so I watched lectures from Welch, Columbus, Stains, and Morkowchuk. Out of all of them, I preferred Morkowchuk's lectures the most because they were the most organized! Her powerpoint slides were easy to read, and she gave great examples. She can talk a little slow, but I just watch her lectures on 2x speed. If organization is important to you, then I highly recommend her. It was difficult for me to follow the other professors' lectures in comparison because they seemed to go on tangents or their ppt slides weren't as organized. Don't be discouraged by all her negative reviews! Chem is a difficult course no matter what; you just have to find the professor with the teaching style best suited for you. As for my grade, I hadn't taken a chemistry course in over two years, but I still ended with an A+. As long as you take good notes and study effectively, you should be fine!

This class is fairly easy if you do the readings and watch the lectures. Professor Morkowchuk goes over the core concepts in an efficient and difficulty appropriate level. I studied a couple hours before each exam along with doing the standard assigned work and did well. I do like and am good at chemistry, so take that information as you will.

Going into this class I was very worried about all of the reviews saying that it would be extremely difficult, but it ended up being a very straightforward class. Lisa was a super energetic teacher who just gives off the vibe of being nice and into her job, and she makes the lecture so that it goes over pretty much exactly what will be on exams. Go to class and you will know how to do most things. There was also so many different homework questions each week that for exams if you feel unprepared you have every opportunity beforehand to practice on challenging topics and putting in any work into this class should give you a good final grade. Also the exams were online and open note so you don’t even have to memorize everything for them. I’d for sure recommend taking Lisa over other teachers as I had several friends that complained about their instructor but I really thought Lisa did her best to make sure everyone had every opportunity to pass her class.

I actually loved Lisa. In her lectures, she always focused mainly on what was most difficult to understand in the chapter that week, and went over most missed chapter problems. I always felt a lot better about the material after walking out of expo. The structure of this class is terrible though. You go to lecture, and then expo, which is where you explore the material with an assigned group, and it is not helpful. Most of the time expo confuses you more, and they make you do a website webmo which makes no sense. My group would always raise our hands because Webmo told us one thing, but the chapter told us something else, and 90% of the time the TA would say webmo is wrong. If its wrong why are we using it so much? Other than expo, tests are super straightforward if you just study a little bit. #tCFspring2022

For some reason, Lisa got a bad wrap when I was talking to my friends, but I really loved her. All of the professors give the same exact workload and tests, so the only difference is the lecture. Lisa really cared that we were all doing well, did mid-lecture check ins, and took our feedback from the weekly homework and used those to guide the lectures based on what we said we were confused on. Tests are all at home open note open resource, so if you prepare materials well they're not bad. Plus there's three parts to each exam, one of which is taken with your Expo group, so lots of places to make up points if you do poorly. If you've taken AP/IB chem, you'll be more than fine, but even if not it's not that hard and lots of room for you to learn.

I loved her! She is so nice and is beyond helpful at office hours. I think her lecture style (go over the major topics and most missed from chapter compared to every tiny thing) fit the class very well and helped me understand the harder topics better than people in other classes. The textbook is slightly annoying because it teaches like you have learned the information in high school but forgot it, so for the first real chapter and inorganic color theory it was a little rough but Morkowchuk knows that and has the perfect lecture to help students understand the content.

I am not one to like chemistry, but I enjoyed this course. Lisa is a really amazing lecturer and she makes sure to cover what the class said they didn’t understand from the chapter. Compared to friends in other sections, it seemed like Lisa explained the material better than the other professors, so definitely take it with her if you have the chance! There is a ton of reading and homework, but it’s pretty manageable if you work on it throughout the week. You have one lecture and one expo (workshop) a week and there are problem sets to do after each one, but they’re similar to the problems done in class.

I have some complaints about this course and its setup, but I don’t have a bad word to say about Prof Morkowchuk! Just to warn you, the textbook is practically useless. There’s typos and misleading questions and tons of information that you will not ever need to know for the tests. I would recommend taking Morkowchuk because her tests are only multiple choice or fill in the blank, whereas I know that some teachers have short answer responses as well. Morkowchuk does a great job in lecture of addressing what it is that students are confused about because she reads the responses in the textbook and bases her lectures off of that. She records lectures as well so you do not need to go if you don’t want to. She also will only test you based on the information that she brings up in lecture, expo, or LBLAs and BITs, not on the other topics in the textbook. Tests are online and open note and not very hard, so don’t worry about those too much. If you took AP chem in high school, this will be mostly review besides a few new chapters.