CHEM 1821

professor was never ready for class, had some dry humor, but almost no teaching occured

Doesn't give a rat's tail for your learning. You never know how you're doing in the class and the entire grade rides on the final, which is pretty much the hardest thing there is (same as Dr. Hunt's, by the way, just curved a little nicer).

Worst class ever. UVA really needs to redo the way these organic labs are taught. The professor and the TAs are very apathetic about the course and which makes this lab class as uninteresting and dry as possible. It is all but impossible to calculate a grade for this class until you have taken the final exam, which is one of the toughest, most vaguely worded, and pointless exams I have ever taken. As of now, there is no way to avoid taking organic lab with MacDonald so I guess it's fair to all the chem majors and premeds out there. Good luck

Simply terrible class. Lots of work and stress, not a whole lot of learning. Arbitrary grading. What more could you want? But hey, you are probably required to take it, so what can you do?

It's an interestingly structured course, I never really figured out exactly how the grading worked. It all depends on the final exam grade, which is frustrating as the only practice for the final is from 1990 and some of the answers make no sense or are incorrect. Get all the help you can from TAs, and being in the top of your lab section helps, at least a little. Lab TAs check to see how well you perform labs too, so read labs beforehand!

horrendous class. While the actually stuff you do in lab is pretty cool-thats about the only positive. TAs don't care and sometimes are not even aware of the procedure for the day. Professor doesn't even come to his own lab lectures-so very few people go. Head TA Tom is pretty cool-nice guy and knows his stuff. Final was by far incredibly hard compared to discussion questions given in the lab manual. Class is a 3 credit lab for a reason-to do reasonably well you gotta put work into it.

I'd tell you not to take this class, but since you're probably in the 80's series already, what choice do you have (sorry if that sounds depressing).

The labs were interesting and I feel like I learned a lot about chemistry coming out of this lab. The lab lectures are pointless (Prof. MacDonald even encourages students to skip), but occasionally useful when writing lab reports. Every time I wrote a lab report, I wanted to die, but I usually got good grades on them. The only problem is that this class is ranked, so the percentage you get is meaningless, except with respect to everybody else's grades. The final exam is brutal.

Typical UVa orgo lab. I don't agree with the ranking system, but at least McDonald throughs out Hunt's lousy final exam questions.

Professor MacDonald is a horrible lecturer. He sounds like Ben Stein from the clear eyes ads, and his monotone voice will put the most dedicated students to sleep with ease. Go to the optional dissertations once a week with Andrew Kennedy instead.