CHEM 3811

This class is just as awful as everyone says. Metcalf is helpful and approachable. Demas is not. The reports take forever and I just gave up on asking anyone for help and worked on them myself. In the end, things turned out okay for me, I guess.

Absolute worst lab I ever took in my undergraduate career. Period.

The reviews below make me lol. anyhoo..

Eun Yi - talk to him about everything, literally he is responsible for everything, he types your final grade into sis. yep, so theres that.

Most unorganized course in the history of unorganization. It's ridiculous actually. Different TA grades each lab report/tells you different things/all are dicks. Id recommend doing the labs that take two weeks at the beginning of the semester unless you can do an independent lab(which I pray you make easy, lets not be overacheivers here). Lecture is only useful for: pre-labs which will take you 5min to do, pop quizzes which are guarenteed because its his only way to get people to go to lecture, and the final, because Demas pulls material from there, and thats it. On the more unsavory side of life, I say by mid-semester just refer to your friends lab reports for what to do/not to do, but you were gonna do that anyway, weren't ya?

I could write a dissertation about this class and submit it to JCE and it may get published...

Overview:
This class is supposed to be some mix of what principles covered in a typical physical chemistry laboratory, quantitative analysis lab, and instrumental lab at other schools. This is what I believe. Anyways, it involves 6 (maybe 7) labs on unrelated topics. One good thing about the course is that you do not write long-form lab reports for each lab. Instead, you only write two long-form reports. The first long-form report is on a lab chosen by Demas. The second is on a lab of your choosing. For the remaining labs, you simply need to do the short answer questions provided. With that said, the short answer questions practically involve doing all the work for a long-form lab report without actually writing it. Then, you take a final exam. Since there are few labs, you technically have two weeks per lab. Some labs require only one lab session; other labs require both lab sessions. The short answer questions are due on the third week. If I remember correctly, the long form is due after your short-answer questions for that lab have been returned to you with a grade. So, there are times where you have a free week off of lab.

Structure:
I, to this day, still do not understand how the structure for this class makes any sense. It baffles me more than the grading scheme for 2411/2421. Everyone is required to do the same lab during the first lab section. The remaining 6 labs can be done in any order of your choosing. This sounds amazing at first until you realize that the lab manual gives you little insight on how to do the short answer questions. Furthermore, some of the questions come from lab lecture, not from the lab manual. Interestingly enough, lab lecture will probably not follow the order in which you choose to do the labs and every lab group can't do the same lab each week. So you're essentially stuck.
The lab lectures always manage to go to the topic of data fitting or looking at his gallery of pictures.
The final exam doesn't cover principles from the lab report. It focuses only on shadily explained concepts from the lab lecture.
The class does not interface with 3410 at all for the most part.

You have no idea what your grade is until after the class is over as the lab reports/short answer questions were never returned on time. Your Collab can be completely blank, then after the final exam you have an explosion of 6-7 grades.

Godspeed on your journey through this class.

I cannot begin to explain just how terrible this course is. It is worth 3 credits, but requires far more time outside of class than any course should in order to succeed. In order to sufficiently understand the material, one must do independent research on every topic covered. Professor Metcalf was one of the few good things in this course. He regularly spoke to students and seemed to understand that, beyond learning the material, students needed to maintain their grade. Professor Demas, and the TAs, however, did not seem to comprehend this fact. Demas seemed unapproachable, and would talk over student's heads. The TAs were polite, but rarely understood what they needed to in order to be effective assistants. More lab equipment could be included, as there was a ridiculous shortage of devices necessary to efficiently perform the experiments. If there is any doubt about the quality of this class after reading through these evaluations.