Reviews for CHEM277

Sort By:

Professor Filter:

Information	Review
Neil Blough CHEM277 Expecting a B ariespink 12/08/2023	Tbh, I said I hated this class so many times this semester but honestly I loved it. I enjoyed labs and just goofing around with my TA and professor Blough. He is pretty funny and cares to engage with students when he comes into the lab. The TAs are super helpful with lab reports and overall want you to succeed.
Ashley Baxter CHEM277 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/20/2023	Dr. Baxter is a great professor! She used a lot of Dr. Kahn’s old materials since it was her first time teaching this class, but she explain concepts well in lecture and posted her slides in ELMS to help us out. All of the resources she gave really helped! The TAs in this class are also pretty good and make themselves available to help us, but they can grade harshly. Only negative thing is she and the TAs take a while to grade our reports and assignments, so by the time we’re working on the next report we still haven’t gotten feedback from the one before and might make the same mistakes. Also the way she curves is completely based on ranking in the class so you need to be in the top 40% for an A, but there’s no way of knowing where you stand.
Neil Blough CHEM277 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 01/03/2023	Dr. Blough is a great professor and I would recommend him! His lectures are clean and concise, and he always comes to class in a cheerful mood. He doesn't seem like much help during the semester which is typical for a lab course (277 is going to depend on your TA a LOT) and you'll feel like you have absolutely no idea what you're doing writing lab reports because you're just dropped into assignments once it starts. By the end, you will feel like you have learned a lot. The exams are very reasonable and similar to past exams, and most students did very well on his exams without curve. However, the lab reports were not so great since there was absolutely no guidance. There is no rubric published to students, but you are certainly graded on one. Ultimately, there was an insane curve (almost 10 points from where I was), but this lab took at least 20-25 hours a week between lab and the reports. 277 may be a 3 credit course but treat it like a 5 credit course. If you can take the class with Blough, I would recommend doing so.
Jason Kahn CHEM277 Expecting an A florm 05/22/2022	277 is a tough course. With two labs per week, there was always a lot going on having to work on the analysis and report for one lab while prepping for the next one. There are 8 labs total, though most of them are broken into multiple parts with separate but related experiments. The protocols were generally easy to follow (as long as you read them beforehand), and could always be completed within the 3 hour lab time. Unfortunately, though, Dr. Kahn sometimes wouldn't post the protocols until the day before or the morning of the lab, at least for the M/W section, which was kinda annoying. In lab, we usually worked in groups of 3 and were able to keep the same group the whole semester. Logistically there were some small issues, like the bottleneck from everyone having to get chemicals from the same fume hood, but they'll probably get sorted out in the future. Most of the labs deal with absorbance/fluorescence spectroscopy, so get used to that. The last lab deals with three different titrations, and there's one lab that's a Matlab simulation about Einstein solids and entropy, but other than that it's all spectroscopy. After all the main labs are done, we had to come up with our own, student-directed lab where we basically just expand on the work from a previous lab. We got 4 lab periods to work on it, and yes we did have to present our results to the class, but they weren't that harsh grading it. Dr. Kahn's lectures were alright, he's a pretty funny guy and clearly cares about what he's teaching. Instead of using slides, though, he would go through a very long and wordy pdf which wasn't always easy to glean important information from. The pdfs were useful references when writing lab reports and studying for exams, but required a lot of digging through. And speaking of the lab reports, we didn't get a rubric for them. He gave a rough outline of what he was looking for on the first couple reports, but after that we were pretty much on our own. There were many times I lost points for things I simply didn't know I needed to include, which was frustrating. As for the exams, they were exceptionally challenging. There's one midterm on the first 4 labs, and a non-cumulative final on the last 4 labs (plus the student-directed lab). The kinds of questions he asked made the exams rather difficult to study for; they weren't excessively specific questions about the protocol, but they could be about almost anything related to the analysis and required a strong intuition which I felt I didn't have. He provided some practice exams, but they're mostly just helpful for familiarizing yourself with his writing style. The exam averages were in the 60s and he didn't curve them, but he did curve the overall grades, so even if you do poorly on the final (like I did) you can still get an A.
Michelle Brooks CHEM277 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/16/2009	Lab report grading was pretty rough due almost entirely to significant figures and graph/table details. I did the most work for this class out of all of my classes due to all of the extra projects that 272 did not have (e.g. wiki page and oral presentation) and the 2 labs a week. Dr. Brooks creates challenging exams, but if you actually do any of the assigned reading (requires less than an hour to review all experiments' reading on an exam) and look over returned lab reports they are quite manageable- just memorizing calculations from reports is not enough. Chem272 would have undoubtably been easier, but 277 gives some insight into writing abstracts, writing reports, and scientific presentations. Dr. Brooks can be intimidating at times, but I think is overall responsive to concerns and reasonable.
Michelle Brooks CHEM277 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/23/2009	She was very patient with our class and also entertaining in lecture. She sometimes was impatient or seemed like she had better things to do, but was overall very helpful outside of class with individual questions as well. Grading was a ***** at first but the class got used to it. Several people in the class had an uncurved A, but she nonetheless curved more anyway.
Michelle Brooks CHEM277 Expecting a B Anonymous 04/08/2009	Hard class. 272 would have been a breeze.