Make sure you get a TA that speaks English. (I am dead serious.) Donald was funny and made cute little jokes. And you need to learn each lab as it comes and not try to cram everything within the last week before the exam. If you think you can learn all of orgo lab within a few days, good luck. You're probably going to fail.

Thankfully, you're not graded on your quality of work. Often there were different results between sections on different days, and sometimes an entire section received no results. The exam was really tough and was a huge factor in the final grades.

It's required for pre-professional work, so just push through it. The grading distribution is based both on your lab section ranking and yoru entire section's grades. Pray for a good TA, go to their office hours, and hope for a decent rank.

Having tried harder than I ever have for a course, I ended up disappointed after the roulette of a final --and I say that because everyone technically fails (average = 50%)-- arbitrated my grade based on a normal distribution. Depressing.

Dr. Hunt is a polite and sometimes humorous professor. His arbitrary grading scale that no one understands and the absolute killer final makes this class the worst class to take of all sciences at UVa. Your TA makes or breaks you.

wait till he dies to take the class. or take it in the summer.

AWFUL!!! take it over the summer. the grading is completely arbitrary. basically do well on your lab reports and help others do well on the final.

Total d-bag

The labs themselves, all 10 of them are intimidating but if you check your steps with your ta as you go and pay close attention to the (mistake filled) lab manual it shouldn't be too hard. The degree of difficulty of the lab reports is dependent on your particular ta. You have to put in the time and effort at the beginning of the semester to go to as many different ta's office hours to figure out who works best for you. Stick to a schedule. Forget the final, seriously, the ta's themselves say that if they took it they would all fail.

The labs themselves weren't terribly difficult just long and exhausting at times. Depending on your TA, they are usually willing to help you with the labs. Dr. Hunt's lab lectures were next to useless yet still important to attend. The final was insanely difficult.