<p>For those of you who have already taken the course, are there any good online reference materials to study from? Since incoming CoC students do not know which textbook is going to be used, as well as the fact that Chem 4a does not post its lectures online.</p>
<p>Any help would be appreciated!</p>
<p>I would also like to know how to prepare for Chem 4a.</p>
<p>The Chem frats have past midterms saved, or so I’m told.</p>
<p>Honestly, I’d say to take comprehensive notes, preferably record lectures and listen to them later while going through said notes, do the practice midterms, and then look through the book for questions similar to those on the practice midterms.</p>
<p>For the first midterm, make sure you review stoichiometry and redox etc.; we had to calculate % composition of original sample or somesuch off of the results of the redox reaction, and that was something covered in the required reading but not something any of us studied because we weren’t expecting it to be on there.</p>
<p>Do all the reading, take reading notes, go to office hours to get any homework problems you got wrong explained to you, go to the voluntary weekly review sessions, go to professor office hours just to hang out, etc… Oh, and do your labs relatively early in the week so you can try to get your GSI to look over them in office hours to catch anything like stupid formatting mistakes - I lost a lot of points on one of mine because my GSI was picky and took off for using captions instead of titles on graphs. Stupid? Yes. But you’ll still lose points for it, and your GSI may have a boner for captions and a deep-seated hatred of graphs. Find out.</p>
<p>And…yeah. It’s a hard class to get an A in.</p>
<p>@jonnosferatu: Whoaaa thanks for all that info!! What’s a “chem frat,” btw?</p>
<p>Ugh, so how do u propose about getting to know what the GSI wants? Should I just ask him directly or something?</p>
<p>I had a fairly long response typed up, but I hit backspace in the process of posting it and the cache dropped it. Bugger.</p>
<p>Trying to reproduce:
<p>2) There are some organizations with Greek names that are devoted to particular subjects. I don’t know much more than this, but if you ask around the class, you’ll probably find someone who knows more, and some people who are actually in the organizations. They tend to have fairly extensive test banks (or so I have been led to believe), though you may need to either join or get a friend to smuggle you some printouts.</p>
<p>3) Other organizations are also good. If you’re a Chem. E., get into AIChE, and if you’re not, find some people who are and ask if you can tag along to any study groups they have with their mentors. There are probably similar organizations for regular Chem majors; same applies there.</p>
<p>And, remember, extensive notes, go to as many (useful) office hours as you can, even if you’ll just be leeching off of other peoples’ questions…etc… Your grade will generally reflect how much work you put in to exposing yourself to the material, and, to a lesser extent, how level-headed you stay during exams and how consistent you are in your lab writeups.</p>
<p>Note the level-headed on exams part there. One of the biggest problems a lot of us had with 4A was that we’d go in for the midterm and freak out once it started. Then we’d go and look it after we got it back and notice that thanks to being in a hurry from panicking, we’d made large numbers of stupid errors or forgotten very simple things that cost us lots of points. Confidence in the fact that you’ve practiced this enough to do it very, very consistently and competently is going to do you a lot of favors - as long as you’ve actually practiced it and know you’re not lying to yourself.</p>
<p>Check out [Chem</a> 4A](<a href=“http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/chem4a/index.html]Chem”>Chem 4A)</p>
<p>I’m an incoming CoC freshman too, so I don’t really have anything else to say…</p>
<p>compared to chem 1A, how much harder is chem 4A? also, when are the usual office hours? and should this affect how i schedule the rest of my classes?
thanks for all the info! :)</p>
<p>1A is significantly less intense than 4A in terms of material - the rubric my 1A friends showed me was literally just what I learned in AP Chem, plus a few weeks spent on Molecular Orbital theory (covered hardcore in 4A) - but, in exchange, you have to deal with a much more frustrating homework submission system, and a lot more competition (pre-meds, etc.). In 4A, there’s a fairly strong sense of camaraderie over the fact that you’re all taking the CoC weeder class together, and, from what I can tell, anyone who starts the semester with a cut-throat attitude will have either transferred out or changed their outlook within a few days of the first midterm.</p>
<p>Basically, the competition in 1A isn’t enough to make it harder than 4A, and I wouldn’t recommend taking 4A unless you have your eye on the College of Chemistry. MAYBE if you’re a BioE looking to go into Synthetic Biology (…currently not an official BioE specialty, but the department intend to add it within the next year or two), but then only because it’s (allegedly) a prereq for the 112 series, which could have some use for SynthBio. 4B’s a fun class to do for the second half of Gen Chem, and isn’t very difficult.</p>
<p>…as to schedule organization: 4A’s a lot of work if you want a good grade, but it’s not impossible to match it up with some of the other “hard” lower divs.
<a href=“http://chemistry.berkeley.edu/student_info/undergrad_info/publications/chem_10_11.pdf[/url]”>http://chemistry.berkeley.edu/student_info/undergrad_info/publications/chem_10_11.pdf</a>
The schedule layouts for Freshman year on that page are extremely reasonable.
The one thing I would definitely NOT recommend is Math 1B and Chem 4A in the same semester. Ideally, you’d be coming in with a 5 on BC (or equivalent on the relevant IB test) or some CC credit, and skipping the Math 1 series entirely (do not trust anybody who tells you that you would be well-advised to take the 1 series even with a 5 on BC - these people are wrong, lying, or both), but I would STRONGLY advice that you NOT take 1B first semester. If you can’t skip the entire 1 series, you MAY (I stress MAY) want to take 1A first semester regardless of AP/IB/CC credit.</p>
<p>If you can skip the entire 1 series, pretty much the only big thing is getting 53 done before the start of Sophomore year so you’re prepared for 7B. 53 vs. 54 (if you’re required to take 54) really just comes down to professor quality.</p>
<p>E7 tends to be a lot of work; I know Chem E.s who did it first semester without THAT much trouble, though.</p>
<p>Again, it’s mostly just an issue of trying not to accidentally overload yourself with work.</p>
<p>jonnosferatu, what year are you? you know so much (XD), thanks!!</p>
<p>a question for the math 1b thing: what about taking math 53/54 in conjunction with chem 4a? would it be a smarter option?</p>
<p>Taking Math 53/54 with Chem 4A is pretty common. It is definitely smarter than taking Math 1B and Chem 4A. Just know that your Chem 4A professor and GSI will treat you as if Chem 4A is your only class, so you need all the help and resources as jonnosferatu mentioned.</p>
<p>And I don’t know why CoC recommends to take E7 at the second semester of sophomore year. It is such a useful class that all engineers should take it as soon as possible. It is time consuming to do the weekly homeworks, but the difficulty of the course is no match for Chem 4A. All I have to say is I felt like quitting life after taking Chem 4A first semester, but after taking E7 in the spring, I thought I had a reason to live again. Sounds crazy, but that how I really felt.</p>
<p>why do ppl always want to quit after chem 4a… dang.
i dont wanna suffer through that agh!</p>
<p>after the difficulty of chem 4a, though, was chem 4b a lot better?</p>
<p>Chem 4A is fascinating with lots of awesome material…and is hard
Chem 4B is fascinating with significantly less material, is ****-easy, and generally allows you to experience the godlike being that is Luciano Moretto.</p>
<p>College of Chemistry is generally billed as having two weeders, 4A and Chem. E. 140. Chemical Engineers have to take both, the others only take 4A. There are other classes you need to “watch out for,” but those are classes that are difficult on the basis of the core material that they’d cover in an equivalent class at ANY college - Physical Chemistry, for example. Those ones are tough, but they’re not unofficially structured with the intent of getting rid of the people who aren’t serious.</p>
<p>I’m entering my second year, and most of what I’ve said is the product of knowing a fairly large number of people from my 4A class, and talking to GSIs and CoC upperclassmen. Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to who actually reflected on the class (or, in the case of the GSIs, paid attention to the range of grades their sections received) observed pretty much exactly the same trend: People who take full advantage of the (considerable) resources at their disposal do well in the class; people who don’t, don’t. My suggestions on lab reports might be a tad paranoid, in response to my dropping roughly a third of a letter grade in the class over points docked for essentially random (but frequent) formatting issues, but everything else stands.</p>
<p>Seconding everything UpMagic said, btw.</p>
<p>wow! thanks for all the information:) so if I’m a bioE major, how hard/ ambitious does this course load sound: chem 4A and Math 54 and E7? Do you know anything about physics 7A?</p>
<p>^ Suicidal, I rarely give downright negative feedback, but that’s the only word I can think of. Even if you understand all the materials from those 3 classes, you are going to literally run out time and will be forced to give up either some of the E7 h/w or the Chem 4A formal lab report. Even though I made an opinion that E7 should be taken ASAP, the weekly E7 h/w is a time-hog of its own and you really need some room for Chem 4A.</p>
<p>yeahh, i was figuring out which class to push back or if i should just take chem 1A instead of chem 4A? i’m a bioE major, any suggestions?
can you also let me know how the homework time compares? thanks.</p>
<p>If you have the option to not take Chem 4A, you should definitely avoid it. I also had the option to take Chem 1A instead, but I was too audacious for that and I definitely got my punishment during the semester (at least one all-nighter per week either hustling up Chem 4A or Physics 7A or Math 53 and unable to pay attention the next day, sup…) and rather heartbreaking GPA in the end. I mean, the lesson learned was, unlike high school, you’re not gonna get any “brownie points” for taking difficult courses. Sure, you can still brag to some folks that you’re taking all these hard, time-consuming courses in one semester, but it’s your own fault if you fail to do well in them. It’s bit sad, but stepping it up just for kicks can be too punishing at Cal. </p>
<p>As for E7, h/w’s can take you 8 hours a week, sometimes in the double-digits depending how much you struggle to answer the questions. For Chem 4A, you have those 3 midterms that will disturb everyone’s minds and 2 formal lab reports that will take quite an effort to finish. There’s no definite amount of hours to do those, but it is rather how much you want to dedicate. But anyway, if I can repeat my freshman year, Chem 4A is definitely a class I would avoid.</p>
<p>Hey UpMagic, how many units did you take your first semester? You say that Chem 4A, Physics 7A, and Math 53 together wasn’t worth the trouble, but do you think it would be reasonable to take just two of them (Chem 4A and Math 53) along one of the R5A reading/comp courses in a 13 unit schedule first semester?</p>
<p>Oh, Chem 4A, Physics 7A, and Math 53 combo were hard for me since I had 2 other classes and a seminar and some clubs I really dedicated into outside of class. There were several people who took Chem 4A - Physics 7A - Math 53 and few of them did get A+/A’s in all three of them. However, I seriously have no idea what these guys’ brains were composed of…</p>
<p>Okay cool, thanks.</p>
<p>you are really helpful! what is your major?
I was in the middle of planning my schedule, and I was wondering how GSI hours and club meetings would conflict? aren’t club meetings usually held during the evenings? what about GSI hours?</p>