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<p>It more of a personal decisions of what you know you can handle. Personally, I think chem 1 and bio 1 together is very, very doable.</p>
<p>My daughter scored 2100 on the SAT, and passed the 6 AP courses she took in highschool.
She is currently taking CHM2045, and is having a very tough time. She was definitely advised not to take BIO, Chem, and Calculus. She is taking PreCalculus and the Chem, but she says that the CHEM is really tough…the schools weeding out class? She does not know anymore if she wants pharmacy because of her experience. I think she took too long to search early for help. Anyway, I’m kind of surprised at how difficult of a class she says it is. She was an excellent highschool student, accepted to all of the universities she applied to including University of North Carolina at Chaple Hill, full ride at University of Miami, and honors program at UF.</p>
<p>I took CHM2046, BSC2010, and PHY2053 w/ labs all at once and did well. I was also taking other classes and doing research and tons of other stuff.</p>
<p>BSC2010 and CHM2045 together is VERY doable. If you are pre-health you better get used to taking 2/3 science classes at once, better earlier than later. In fact, I would RECOMMEND that a student take both and do not understand why advisers tell incoming freshmen not too. Chem 1 and Bio 1 are the perfect pre-med classes… not too hard and not too easy… nice and in the middle. There WILL be harder classes that will come (orgo and physics) as well as even easier ones (microbio). So i think the BSC2010/CHM2045 duo is a perfect test of the waters to see if you can hack it.</p>
<p>Just because they are taking the class a second-semester freshman or first semester sophmore won’t make the classes any less hard. They always cite the “you need the first semester to transition” excuse when it really shouldn’t matter… You have to be on your A-game as soon as you arrive. The first semester of college is college, it should be taken just as seriously as the last semester. And college is hard and requires lots of studying. If you can’t figure that out in your first semester then you shouldn’t have come to college at all.</p>
<p>and Miamora, despite your daughter’s stunning secondary school achievements and fabulous college offers, it has little bearing on how well she will do as a science student at a university. About 15% of a premed class gets an A while more or less 50 percent of students taking an AP exam pass. This might be shocking to you but just because your daughter passed an exam and did well at the high school level for a subject doesn’t mean she knows her stuff on the college level. This is why we have college. That is also why many professional health programs do not equate credits at a 4 year university with credits earned from an AP exam.</p>
<p>What I find crazy about all of this is that Chem 1 and Bio 1 were, at least when I took them, not <em>truly</em> curved. There was a pre-determined cut off for an A in the syllabus where, if you got that many points, you were promised an A. This is unlike organic or Biochem where the cutoffs for each grade are determined at the end of the class based on the mean and standard deviation of the final averages and it is adjusted so only 15% get an A. So, theoretically, everyone in a Chem 1 class could get an A. But it obviously never happens. Furthermore, the averages are always more or less the same. The class averages in my chem 1 class were high 60’s and low 70’s. 20 years ago when my parents might have been in this class they were also high 60’s and low 70’s. When our professor fit the class averages into his pre-set cutoffs in my Chem 1 class he had about 16% getting an A. He laughs at this… and finds it funny… how consistent his scale is with what the class performance ends up being. And then he remarks how its the same year after year. Despite how ‘prestigious’ and selective it is to get into UF and how the incoming freshman class has had higher and higher stats over the years, some things still never change. And what’s crazy about this is that… despite the fact that everyone has a fair shot at a good grade, the class still does an excellent job at “weeding out” despite the fact that it is not <em>trying</em> to weed out by restricting the amount of A’s or B’s handed out.</p>
<p>Were one of those 6 AP’s AP Chem?</p>
<p>Has she evaluated why she is having problems in the class? Usually you can do this after the 1 exam and change you study method for the future ones. Things to look at are (1) is it the calculations (2) the conceptual questions (3) is she studying things in too much detail where she is missing the big picture, etc. </p>
<p>I took chem, calc, and bio together however each person kind of knows where their limit is.</p>
<p>mystifire, posted something that I agree with. </p>
<p>I don’t think any of these classes are “weed out” classes. There is a set grading scale in the syllabus, so you know what you need to get to earn a A or B.</p>