CHEM277 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Ashley Baxter CHEM277 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/29/2024	I had so much hope for this class at the beginning of the semester. I already expected it to be a lot of work, which was not the problem. Dr. Baxter was the problem, we were supposed to meet every Monday of the semester... we met 4 times (one of those being for a mid-term that was horrible) those other classes she would cancel the class an hour before knowing we all had questions about the topics of our lab reports. You might be wondering about office hours, SHE CANCELLED THOSE ALSO so we were often left with our questions while also still needing to do our reports. When completing lab reports Dr. Baxter would not give clear directions in a lecture about how to do calculations with our data which made it very difficult to complete lab reports when you asked her questions she would give very vague answers. Also, expect to print out 20+ paged reports almost every week. The only good thing good about this class is the final lab which you choose what you want to do. I hope this semester she just had something going on and comes back stronger next semester. Good Luck!
Ashley Baxter CHEM277 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/29/2024	2/10 we had a total of 4 lectures throughout the entire semester. the class contains one lecture and two labs both of which were cancelled at some point due to dr.baxter’s unavailability. I am sure there were things going on in her personal life but she did not share that with us so it just seemed like she didn’t care as office hours were also canceled as well with the lab report still due PRINTED. it was just very clear there were some miscommunications around the TAs and us as often times the lab reports were graded comparatively not on a paper by paper basis. there are 6 lab reports 2 of which are done in a group a midterm and a final which would have been fine IF we had class however the class averaged a 60/70 respectively for both. again the class itself is difficult but survivable dr.baxter made it wayy harder than it needed to be. good luck if you’re taking it you’ll probably be fine but it is taxing on the health.
Ashley Baxter CHEM277 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/24/2024	If you're a chem or biochem major, good luck. This was the most disorganized class I've ever taken at UMD. The first half of the semester Baxter would cancel her classes just hours before. Then she just cancelled lectures for the rest of the semester, which is very hypocritical of a professor who in her syllabus writes that she "does not think it is too much to ask that you attend lecture." She would also cancel office hours and was constantly changing the lab report due dates. There were no rubrics for the lab reports, and expectations were very unclear. She was supposed to have lectures to go over what to include, but again would either cancel the lecture or post a video way after the lab was completed and skim over relevant calculations because we "already did them." Lab reports took nearly a full twenty four hours of straight work to write every week because you had to figure everything out yourself. Lab procedures were unclear, and there were frequently mistakes with the materials that were provided to us in lab. Baxter would either wait to announce corrections/give us the necessary supplementary data until the day before the report was due or would not do so at all. There was no instruction on how to do lab report calculations. The TAs wouldn't read the entirety of the lab reports and could not explain their grading to students. If you asked a question, they couldn't give you an answer and would say "it is what it is." They gave no feedback and would return the lab reports extremely late (I never got two of mine back at all), so if you got points off you wouldn't know why and didn't have the opportunity to fix the next lab report or to review them for the exam. Baxter didn't decide whether or not there would be a curve (there wasn't) until the very end of the semester, so you don't know where you stand. She was also rude to students and would be visibly distracted during office hours. She seems to be nicer to non majors, but if you're a major she expects you to be able to do everything with no instruction.
Ashley Baxter CHEM277 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/24/2024	Bchm/chm majors... don't be deceived by her high average right now. trust. If i could give her 0 stars, I would—and I thought 177 was bad. I genuinely have never taken a course where the professor has no regard for their students whatsoever, she canceled lecture for the rest of the semester midway through, and even canceled her open office hours 99% of the time too. I'm pretty sure thats not even allowed. You're telling me she couldn't have informed us about her "appointment" excuses at least the day before? She would send out announcements for cancellations AN HOUR BEFORE. she had no respect for our time. The reports are not given back in time to improve on the next ones, and when we did get the reports back barely any good feedback or explanation was given for the ridiculous amount of points they took off. Not to mention there was no rubric so we didn't have initial expectations, and we didn't have feedback to improve.. so it was a lose-lose situation AND the TAs didn't know what was going on either—because guess what, she canceled virtually all of her professor-TA meetings! Even the TAs complained about her. I was always mad about this class, and I think the department should have done something. If a professor doesn't wish to do their job and teach they need to find a substitute or assistant who can fill in. It was a ridiculous semester. I lost the most sleep over this class for no good reason. this is just a lab its not even supposed to be this complicated. Anyways pray you dont have her.
Ashley Baxter CHEM277 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/17/2024	easily the worst lab coordinator. Does not give partial credit on exams, does not disclose rubrics for reports, canceled every lecture after the midterm exam. Writes terrible protocols, canceled all of her meetings with the TA's took off points on final presentations for not having comically large texts even though she chose to sit as far as possible from the projector screen. Reports can take 20-50 hours of work to complete ranging from 15-35 pages while having to do other assignments. Absolutely brutal class not helped by the fact she gives no help.
Ashley Baxter CHEM277 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/16/2024	I believe Baxter might be let go of due to her lack of attendance. I’m not sure how the gen chem 1 students are faring but I genuinely don’t remember the last time I had a lecture with her as she’s always canceling class. The assignments were lengthy and required a lot of critical thinking— the TAs were fortunately generous with grading since I think they’re aware of our lack of guidance.
Ashley Baxter CHEM277 Anonymous 04/13/2024	I don't know what she has gone through in life to be acting like this, but I have never had a professor like her. As a disclaimer, this class, in general, is hard, but I think she made it harder than it needed to be. There is no reason for me to be submitting a full length lab report almost every week while also submitting a big final project the same week the final for the class is. There was no rubric, and a lot of the procedures had vague directions on what steps to take, if I'm going to be working with chemicals, I personally would prefer to know which ones I should and shouldn't be mixing. I will say this class itself is horrible and completely unreasonable, so it's not just her; there is no way in hell that any professional chemist is submitting lab reports with minimal time in between to properly prepare.
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.

Ashley Baxter
CHEM277

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
05/29/2024

I had so much hope for this class at the beginning of the semester. I already expected it to be a lot of work, which was not the problem. Dr. Baxter was the problem, we were supposed to meet every Monday of the semester... we met 4 times (one of those being for a mid-term that was horrible) those other classes she would cancel the class an hour before knowing we all had questions about the topics of our lab reports. You might be wondering about office hours, SHE CANCELLED THOSE ALSO so we were often left with our questions while also still needing to do our reports. When completing lab reports Dr. Baxter would not give clear directions in a lecture about how to do calculations with our data which made it very difficult to complete lab reports when you asked her questions she would give very vague answers. Also, expect to print out 20+ paged reports almost every week. The only good thing good about this class is the final lab which you choose what you want to do. I hope this semester she just had something going on and comes back stronger next semester. Good Luck!

Ashley Baxter
CHEM277

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
05/29/2024

2/10 we had a total of 4 lectures throughout the entire semester. the class contains one lecture and two labs both of which were cancelled at some point due to dr.baxter’s unavailability. I am sure there were things going on in her personal life but she did not share that with us so it just seemed like she didn’t care as office hours were also canceled as well with the lab report still due PRINTED. it was just very clear there were some miscommunications around the TAs and us as often times the lab reports were graded comparatively not on a paper by paper basis. there are 6 lab reports 2 of which are done in a group a midterm and a final which would have been fine IF we had class however the class averaged a 60/70 respectively for both. again the class itself is difficult but survivable dr.baxter made it wayy harder than it needed to be. good luck if you’re taking it you’ll probably be fine but it is taxing on the health.

Ashley Baxter
CHEM277

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/24/2024

If you're a chem or biochem major, good luck. This was the most disorganized class I've ever taken at UMD. The first half of the semester Baxter would cancel her classes just hours before. Then she just cancelled lectures for the rest of the semester, which is very hypocritical of a professor who in her syllabus writes that she "does not think it is too much to ask that you attend lecture." She would also cancel office hours and was constantly changing the lab report due dates. There were no rubrics for the lab reports, and expectations were very unclear. She was supposed to have lectures to go over what to include, but again would either cancel the lecture or post a video way after the lab was completed and skim over relevant calculations because we "already did them." Lab reports took nearly a full twenty four hours of straight work to write every week because you had to figure everything out yourself. Lab procedures were unclear, and there were frequently mistakes with the materials that were provided to us in lab. Baxter would either wait to announce corrections/give us the necessary supplementary data until the day before the report was due or would not do so at all. There was no instruction on how to do lab report calculations. The TAs wouldn't read the entirety of the lab reports and could not explain their grading to students. If you asked a question, they couldn't give you an answer and would say "it is what it is." They gave no feedback and would return the lab reports extremely late (I never got two of mine back at all), so if you got points off you wouldn't know why and didn't have the opportunity to fix the next lab report or to review them for the exam. Baxter didn't decide whether or not there would be a curve (there wasn't) until the very end of the semester, so you don't know where you stand. She was also rude to students and would be visibly distracted during office hours. She seems to be nicer to non majors, but if you're a major she expects you to be able to do everything with no instruction.

Ashley Baxter
CHEM277

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/24/2024

Bchm/chm majors... don't be deceived by her high average right now. trust. If i could give her 0 stars, I would—and I thought 177 was bad. I genuinely have never taken a course where the professor has no regard for their students whatsoever, she canceled lecture for the rest of the semester midway through, and even canceled her open office hours 99% of the time too. I'm pretty sure thats not even allowed. You're telling me she couldn't have informed us about her "appointment" excuses at least the day before? She would send out announcements for cancellations AN HOUR BEFORE. she had no respect for our time. The reports are not given back in time to improve on the next ones, and when we did get the reports back barely any good feedback or explanation was given for the ridiculous amount of points they took off. Not to mention there was no rubric so we didn't have initial expectations, and we didn't have feedback to improve.. so it was a lose-lose situation AND the TAs didn't know what was going on either—because guess what, she canceled virtually all of her professor-TA meetings! Even the TAs complained about her. I was always mad about this class, and I think the department should have done something. If a professor doesn't wish to do their job and teach they need to find a substitute or assistant who can fill in. It was a ridiculous semester. I lost the most sleep over this class for no good reason. this is just a lab its not even supposed to be this complicated. Anyways pray you dont have her.

Ashley Baxter
CHEM277

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
05/17/2024

easily the worst lab coordinator. Does not give partial credit on exams, does not disclose rubrics for reports, canceled every lecture after the midterm exam. Writes terrible protocols, canceled all of her meetings with the TA's took off points on final presentations for not having comically large texts even though she chose to sit as far as possible from the projector screen. Reports can take 20-50 hours of work to complete ranging from 15-35 pages while having to do other assignments. Absolutely brutal class not helped by the fact she gives no help.

Ashley Baxter
CHEM277

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/16/2024

I believe Baxter might be let go of due to her lack of attendance. I’m not sure how the gen chem 1 students are faring but I genuinely don’t remember the last time I had a lecture with her as she’s always canceling class. The assignments were lengthy and required a lot of critical thinking— the TAs were fortunately generous with grading since I think they’re aware of our lack of guidance.

Ashley Baxter
CHEM277

Anonymous
04/13/2024

I don't know what she has gone through in life to be acting like this, but I have never had a professor like her. As a disclaimer, this class, in general, is hard, but I think she made it harder than it needed to be. There is no reason for me to be submitting a full length lab report almost every week while also submitting a big final project the same week the final for the class is. There was no rubric, and a lot of the procedures had vague directions on what steps to take, if I'm going to be working with chemicals, I personally would prefer to know which ones I should and shouldn't be mixing. I will say this class itself is horrible and completely unreasonable, so it's not just her; there is no way in hell that any professional chemist is submitting lab reports with minimal time in between to properly prepare.

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.

Reviews for CHEM277