<p>How difficult is the class? I'm considering self-studying so I can take the CASE exam, allowing my to have fewer credits for second semester. How should I go about doing this?</p>
<p>They don’t offer the exam in the spring. Chill, it’s fine.</p>
<p>Actually I checked and they do offer the CASE.</p>
<p>Okay my bad; I’ll try to give you the run down what happened this semester. The last time our instructor taught 2090 was around 2006. Many people think he got a lot of bad evaluations that year so Cornell stopped putting him as that instructor. Lately, they needed him back as an instructor so they gave him a try.</p>
<p>He was honestly just a bad teacher, but it wasn’t THAT bad. First of all, if you took the extra hour to go through the homework solutions and master the material, you had an advantage. If you went through the lecture notes and made sure you understood the gist (and if you didn’t, you asked your TA after lab), you had a HUGE advantage.</p>
<p>Many people failed to do both of these. Luckily for people who did, however, it made the class so much easier. If he WOULD have been a good teacher, everyone would have been on an even playing field for the prelims/final.</p>
<p>Now that you know what happened last semester, this next semester, the instructor has pretty good reviews. If you are able to learn all of the 2090 material in a month, I promise that you won’t have a problem in the class. It is ultimately your choice, but I can guarantee the complaining you heard from this semester 2090 won’t be present next semester and those people went into the prelim knowing they didn’t understand all of the material.</p>
<p>You should take the CASE for both Chem classes, if you can. I wrote a post about the Chem 2080 CASE a few years ago, but since they don’t switch the questions from year to year you can probably still use that.</p>