<p>Alright boys and girls, be real with me. I always known that I'm no good at chemistry, but I'm pre-med and so I sucked it up and took Chem 1A this semester. For all you ChemE, MCB, Math, or Physics majors, I may seem like a wimp. However, I am a historical/literary kind of person. Yet as a pre-med, I had to take Chem 1A and I have a 69% test average right now. The class is set on a slight point system curve (Professor Nitsche), but I want blunt and honest opinions of how much I could possibly salvage my grade on the final. Do lab/OWL grades usually help? And if so, how much?</p>
<p>That leads to....am I going to die in Chem 3A</p>
<p>This is bad...just want to know how bad it actually is.</p>
<p>I think Chem 1A and 3A are different enough where you should not expect to do the same in 3A as you did in 1A. Some people are much better at Ochem than general chem.</p>
<p>But yeah, as a fellow student who can’t do chemistry to save her life, Chem 3A is pretty brutal. And it just gets worse with 3B.</p>
<p>I’m in Chem 3A right now and I feel like it’s generally easier than Chem 1A. jb is right in the sense that 1A and 3A are totally different classes, to the point where I don’t think your performance in 3A even hinges much on 1A knowledge. It’s much more detail oriented and your scores on tests are well correlated with how much work you put in. Don’t get discouraged by 1A - maybe 3A is your thing.</p>
<p>i don’t believe that there are “chem people” and “history people.” Sure some things might interest us more than others but in the end people who seem to progress are the ones who the subject matter “clicks” for and they work at understanding it and develop that understanding. Chem 3A was pretty straightforward for me and I was never a person who excelled in chem during high school or 1A.</p>
<p>1A is about memorizing a bunch of random facts that aren’t really visualized and require some abstract thinking (while at the same time being as precise as you can be). 3A requires a lot of visualization, molecular model sets, mechanisms, forward thinking, ect. It can actually be very rewarding to figure out the correct pathway that a molecule takes to become a product or predicting the correct product and knowing why it was formed. </p>
<p>If I were you, I wouldn’t put myself out of contention for an entire subject that you don’t know anything about yet based on 1 bad semester. best of luck.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses, they are truly appreciated. They make me feel a lot better…now I just have to get to work.</p>
<p>I did very well in CHEM 1A but average at best in CHEM 3A. Most people are the other way around and that may be you too-so don’t give up hope yet!</p>