CHEM 1410

If you put in the work, getting an A should be easy. The grading is fair -- there are 3 exams (each worth 15%) and a final exam (20%). Exams are separated into three parts: MC on-your-own (lecture day), 5 MC hard questions (complete before workshop, same 5 MC (complete at workshop w/ group, one copy submitted). Just hope your expo group is good or else it'll make expo unbearable. Lecture isn't helpful, he focuses on one niche topic from the chapter reading that usually isn't even on the test. You're better off going to office hours. Overall, Welch is a good guy -- he's flexible and easy to talk to, he's not trying to make your life difficult. At the end of the day, its an intro class.

I hated chemistry going into this class and I still hate it (it was a required class) BUT I will say as someone who hates the subject, Kevin Welch is a great professor who's really understanding and passionate about what he teaches (+1). Every week there's lecture and expo. Before lectures, you have to complete the weekly textbook reading along with a bunch of questions graded on accuracy and lectures just go over exactly what the textbook reading was about. I never found I was missing out on too much when I didn't go to lecture because I had a solid understanding of the topic as a result of the homework. You better hope your expo group is good though. This is the group you'll be with the entire semester working together during expo to work through problems (based on accuracy!!) and the group you'll be taking the group test with.
#tCFF24

I took this class in my first semester as a first year and I enjoyed it, despite not being a chem/pre med major. This class consists of weekly assignments on TopHat (chap readings, bit, lbla), 3 exams (individual + group), a final, and 3 portfolios. It is so important to do well on those TopHat assignments because it will help your grade! It is also super important to actually like your Expo group because you are stuck with them the entire year and do group exams with them, so ask to switch in the beginning if you do not like them! This class is definitely not an easy class so go to help hours because that helped me a lot. Some of the TAs during help hours were more helpful than others so basically use that time to work with other students as well. If you are struggling in the first few chapters, just know it does get better as you keep going!

Kevin Welch is an amazing professor for CHEM 1410. During his weekly lecture, he teaches a good amount of information pretty concisely and in a really helpful way. I think the best part of the class is the discussion sessions once a week, where we collaborate in groups on either chemistry problem sets or the group exams. The class is amazing and I definitely recommend the professor.

Professor Welch is a good professor and cares about your success in this class. He made very helpful review videos for the final which I thought was nice. Personally, I did not enjoy this class a lot while I was taking it, although I did learn a lot and it doesn’t seem so bad now that it’s done. The format of this class is more like a “flipped classroom” but not fully. You teach yourself most of the content through weekly readings that are usually quite long, and review assignments with practice problems. Each week there is a lecture that is pretty helpful. There is also an “expo” each week in which you get in groups and do problem sets, then another review assignment for homework. This class is pretty heavy on work but it isn’t super hard to succeed. You take an individual exam for each midterm and a group exam that counts for less each exam: 75% then 50% then 25%. The homeworks also are a portion of the grade. The class gets off to a quick start where you will first learn about orbitals which seem very complicated if you’ve never dealt with them, but become very easy by the end of the class. The final is not super difficult and had questions very similar to all of the midterm exams, so studying those is a good idea. Overall it’s a decently hard class conceptually but the grading is pretty forgiving.

Welch is a great proffesor, he doesn't give practice exams like some of the others, but the tests arent hard, so you don't really need them.

The main structure of the class was kind of annoying. Each week we had a: Chapter reading with questions, Bringing it Together (BIT), Looking Back Looking Ahead (LBLA), and then work in the expo. Pretty much everything is graded on accuracy, but the grading is extremely leniant, especially on group exams.

I think if you try and do all of your work on time you can definitely get an A/A-. You get a cheat sheet (paper front and back) that you can make and bring to each exam. The TAs were helpful sometimes in the expo sessions, but not always. As you go on in the course the exam grades become more and more reliant on your own knowledge and not the group exam not as much (initially the group exam is a lot of your exam grade and then it transitions to less and less as you go on 70%, 45%, 20%, and obviously 0% for the final).

The final is not too bad, expecially if you go over the other exams (Welch posted them before the final). Overall, would reccomend!

I think Welch is a very nice man and a pretty good chemistry teacher, but his lectures won’t get you an A in the course. Chemistry is really about application and you need to make sure you’re putting lots of effort into your personal success.

Professor welch is a very good lecturer for the things he does cover, but there is a lot he will not get to during class and may just brush over in expo that will be tested on--so it is very important to do the chapter readings seriously and not just do the questions with chat. His tests are very fair but there is not a curve and that many questions on each test so you do need to get almost everything right in order to get an A in the class. There is some opportunity for partial credit on the exams, but its not much.

He is definitely the best professor for chem 1410 and i had a way better time in the class than my friends who had other professors so you should definitely try and take welch if possible, its usually not an issue with the class being full as my section had seats open

I would say that if you are looking between professors, Welch is a solid option, but not the best. The content that he tests on is definitely "easier," however he does not do a good job of teaching it himself. Expo is practically irrelevant to the exams and the final, which makes it hard and useless. Secondly, during his lectures, Welch does not actually truly teach the content. During the first couple of weeks it's fine, but later on, he mostly will cover one thing during the entire hour and 15 minutes, which is really frustrating as it leads to a lot of self teaching. However, he is a really understanding professor and answers questions if you have them. My biggest issue was not knowing which questions to ask as I wasn't sure what was relevant until AFTER the test. The other professors, however, give practice exams.

This course isn’t conceptually very hard, but it was extremely annoying. Each week you read a textbook chapter and answer questions on it, attend one lecture covering the same material with another set of homework questions, participate in a small-group session (Expo) with more questions, and then complete Expo homework with… even more questions.

What makes this especially frustrating is that the lecture comes after the textbook reading and graded questions. As a result, you often spend hours working through dense material before it’s been explained, only for the same concepts to be re-taught a few days later. This makes the workload feel inefficient and the lectures feel slow, since you’ve already developed a deeper understanding of the material by the time it’s presented in class. The structure feels completely backwards and repetitive.

All of this repetition does lead to a strong understanding of the material, and Welch is a very solid professor. That said, the sheer volume of mandatory practice problems is daunting. I regularly spent 5+ hours a week answering what felt like the same few questions in slightly different forms.

Exams are split into two parts: an individual exam that is fairly straightforward if you keep up with the coursework, and a group exam with very strange and difficult questions that often feel way beyond the scope of the class. The saving grace is that the group exam has generous partial credit, often giving 80-90% credit for an incorrect answer.

Overall, if you put in the work, keep up with assignments, and genuinely try to understand the material, this course is an easy A. Just be prepared for a level of busywork that will test your patience every single week.