Summer Session C 2009: This course is incredibly fast-paced! Merlic covers copious amounts of material each lecture. Keep up! If you walk into a lecture without knowing the material from the previous lecture, all of a sudden you'll have four hours worth of material to learn - that's A LOT of studying! It's much harder than 30A, in which you do half a quarter of review and then learn 1-4 reactions per day. Try doing anywhere from 15-20 reactions per lecture!

There are basically two types of chapters in this class: the mechanisms and reactions of specific functional groups, & spectroscopy/spectrometry. The first week & a half are reaction/mechanism-based and will feel very overwhelming! This is when you really have to memorize and keep up. If you can do that, then you will be set for the first midterm. From then on until third week, it is spectroscopy/spectrometry - this material is not too hard; less memorization, more technique. After that, it's 2.5 more weeks of reactions and mechanisms that you need to memorize, but these all have the same basic idea and are easier to reason out rather than commit to memory. Just stay on top of things and you should be fine - the key is being consistent with your studying/homework and understanding the concepts behind each reaction.

This summer, the class started out at ~82 and dropped down to 57 - totally understandable because are many times during lecture when you feel discouraged because Merlic teaches much faster than one can write. However, you'll feel better when you are reviewing afterward - at the end of each chapter there's a list of all the things you need to know. If you copy those down and make a study packet over the course of the quarter, the final will be much easier to study for.

You can find Merlic's old tests from 2005, 2006, and 2009 on VOH - the material from each test is very similar from year to year.

Grading: 25% each MT, 50% final. Merlic's policy for assigning grades is pretty reasonable; he looks at your three scores, and gives you a grade based on how well you know your stuff - you basically get what you deserve. If you fail the midterms but get a 100 on the final, you get an A+ in the class.

You have to work (very) hard, but he rewards you at the end. And he's a great teacher - you'll definitely come out feeling like you learned something.