<p>I know that organic chemistry is the study of carbon compounds, but...what makes it so hard in college? Is it a lot of workload, memorization, or just difficult concepts?</p>
<p>I personally don't think that the concepts are actually very hard, relatively speaking. Yeah, you have to memorize a lot, but no more so than in many other classes. For example, I would submit that you might actually be expected to memorize much more in a foreign language class. Go take, say, a Chinese class. Now that's some SERIOUS memorization. </p>
<p>There's also a lot of concepts that require logic, but again, no more so than, say, a typical college physics or math course. </p>
<p>What really kills you is generally not the concepts, because the concepts are not really that hard to understand. What kills you? One word - the curve. For some odd reason, looks like almost all the colleges out there have decided to agree that OChem is going to be a weeder class where the grading curve is going to be extremely low. Keep in mind that in a curved class, your grade is not determined solely by what you know. It is actually determined by what you know relative to what everybody else knows. You can know a lot and still fail, if everybody else knows more than you. Furthermore, weeder courses are notorious for only giving out a small percentage of A's. Getting an A is not just about know the material well, it's about scoring in the highest X percentile in the class that the curve deems is deserving of an A. </p>
<p>What I have found is that course difficulty doesn't have that much to do with the difficulty of the actual material. Difficult has mostly to do with the grading curve. Any class can be made difficult through use of a curve. A class on simple arithmetic could be made astoudingly difficult just by using a very harsh curve.</p>
<p>I agree with Sakky. After talking to a few pre-meds and asking the same question, a lot of them told me the same thing: the class wasn't extremely difficult (or at least more difficult than other pre-medcourses), but the # of people who got good grades was remarkably low.</p>
<p>My advice (this is what I'm doing as well): read the textbook and understand the material BEFORE you enter the classroom. I know it kind of sucks (and defeats the purpose of taking a class) to learn the material and essentially sit through what you've already learned, but pulling an A in orgo could mean the difference between a good pre-med and a great one.</p>
<p>What I found mostly difficult about this class is not so much understanding the concepts, but THE AMOUNT OF MATERIAL I was expected to master. After getting one exam over with, I had to start studying for the next one practically the following day. OChem puts a great emphasis on reaction mechanisms and electron transfer and a good "science person" will have no trouble understanding these. The trick is to be able to repeat them from memory and it would take a true genious to get away with no studying. Of course, just as others have said, the curve does not make things easier. In my class only 4 ppl out of 75 recieved A's while 11 got F's and 21 ended up with C's. I'm not sure how exactly they figure out the curve because the ranges are not even at all. I'd be curious to find out.</p>
<p>Rman3008, linzi223 , y'all are exactly right. It further reinforces one of my other points which is that the whole premed process is, sadly, a game. It's a beauty contest. The goal isn't really to learn anything, the real goal, sadly, is to get good grades. This is particularly true with OChem, the prototypical 'premed' class. </p>
<p>Which is why I would say that if there is one class that I would say that you might want to use 'tricks' to survive, it's OChem. What are possible tricks? One has been mentioned already - having already learned OChem through self-study BEFORE you take the class. Another trick would be to simply delay taking the class itself until after you've already applied to med-school, so that the adcoms can't see your OChem grade. Naturally, this will require self-study in order to score decently on the OChem part of the MCAT, but at least you won't risk having to presenting a bad OChem grade. {Think of it this way. Most OChem classes are not taught very well, such that you probably won't learn much more about OChem by taking the class than you would just through self-study. Hence, while it is true that you might self-study OChem and get a bad MCAT score, the truth is, you probably wouldn't have gotten a better MCAT score by having taken the actual OChem class, and you'd probably also have a bad OChem grade to boot. Let's face it. It's better to have only a bad MCAT score than to have both a bad MCAT and a bad OChem grade. } </p>
<p>Another trick would be to not take OChem in your regular school at all, but rather to do it in a local community college. Now obviously this doesn't work if you're a bio or chem major. But if you're not, there's nothing that says that you must take your school's version of OChem. OChem at a community college will almost certainly be easier. Community colleges also tend to have highly liberal drop policies - so that if you can see that you're going to get a bad grade, you just drop the class. True, it's better to get an OChem A from a top school than from a community college. But as mentioned above, most people won't get A's. It's better to have an A from a community college than a C from a normal school.</p>
<p>Wait, I don't quite understand your version of "the curve". How are test curved colleges and how are they different from high school? Are the test that hard that without the curve almost everyone fails so they make a curve so at least some aprt of the class passes? Someone just explain to me more in depth how curves work in college.</p>
<p>No, it's generally more like they use the curve to ENSURE that some people always fail.</p>
<p>Obviously I don't know what grading scheme your high school uses, but from what I've seen very few high schools actually curve their grades. What that means is that you are only competing against yourself for a grade. Your grade is determined solely by what you do. If you learn the material well, then you will get an A, regardless of what everybody in the class is doing. Hence, in theory, everybody in a high school class could get get an A. The only competition is with yourself.</p>
<p>Not so with curved college courses. College curves ensure that the competition is with the other students. Only a set percentage of each grade will be handed out. Hence, not everybody can get an A. In fact, only a set (and usually small) percentage can. And a set percentage of the class must end up with a C or worse. </p>
<p>Hence, the key difference is that you are now in direct competition with the other students, because nobody wants to be the one to end up with the bad grade. You are now graded not on what you know, but rather where you stand relative to everybody else. </p>
<p>I'll give you a vivid example that I know of. It's from an engineering class, but the principle is the same. I know a guy who took an engineering class, and scored somewhere in the 80's out of 100 on his exam. Pretty decent right? Wrong. Why? Because the mean test score (the average score of everybody in that class) was a 95. Also, that class was curved to a C+, so that if you got the average (whatever that average happened to be), you would be earning a C+. So this guy's score was basically equivalent to at best a D, and probably an F. Think about that. He clearly understood most of the material on the test. But that didn't matter. The only thing that mattered is that he didn't do as well as the other people in the class. That's what people mean when they say "the curve failed me". </p>
<p>And of course when the curves are rough and the stakes are really high, then that leads to all kinds of cutthroat competitive behavior. A lot of students realize that one way to get a better grade is to make all the students get lower scores. I believe that it was in Scott Turow's autobiographical book "1-L" which detailed the author's first year at Harvard Law, how certain students would go around hiding books in the law library so that other students would not be able to find them, or even deliberately tearing pages out of those books so that other students would not be able to read them. The idea of course is that by denying resources to other students, you will look better on the curve. </p>
<p>Here's Michael Crichton, the author of Jurassic Park and creator of the TV show ER, recalling his days as a premed at Harvard. Has clearly quite successful as a premed, graduating summa cum laude and going to Harvard Medical. Yet his description of his premed days are pretty harsh:</p>
<p>"In general, I found Harvard an exciting place, where people were genuinely focused on study and learning, and with no special emphasis on grades. But to take a premed course was to step into a different world -- nasty and competitive. The most critical course was organic chemistry, Chem 20, and it was widely known as a "screw your buddy" course. In lectures, if you didn't hear what the instructor had said and asked the person next to you, he'd give you the wrong information; thus you were better off leaning over to look at his notes, but in that case he was likely to cover his notes so you couldn't see. In the labs, if you asked the person at the next bench a question, he'd tell you the wrong answer in the hope that you would make a mistake or, even better, start a fire. We were marked down for starting fires. In my year, I had the dubious distinction of starting more lab fires than anyone else, including a spectacular ether fire that set the ceiling aflame and left large scorch marks, a stigmata of ineptitude hanging over my head for the rest of the year. I was uncomfortable with the hostile and paranoid attitude this course demanded for success. I thought that a humane profession like medicine ought to encourage other values in its candidates. But nobody was asking my opinion. I got through it as best I could. "</p>
<p>So is it better to take orgo during the summer or during the school year?</p>
<p>I would argue that in sakky's example, the guy deserved the grade he got. Who cares if he scored a 80? If everyone else scored 95, then he deserved to get the grade of someone who scored 15% below the mean. </p>
<p>"Keep in mind that in a curved class, your grade is not determined solely by what you know. It is actually determined by what you know relative to what everybody else knows."</p>
<p>Is this supposed to be some huge relevation? The more you know, the better the grade you get (in most cases) regardless of whether the class is curved. It's far easier to spend some time raising your own average by 15% then to try to bring down the mean of a 600-person class by 15%. Instead of worrying about how curves work, the OP and anyone else in college should worry about doing their best. Once you're in college, it doesn't take too long before you discover where you stand in relation to the other students.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I would argue that in sakky's example, the guy deserved the grade he got. Who cares if he scored a 80? If everyone else scored 95, then he deserved to get the grade of someone who scored 15% below the mean.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yeah, but that just opens a giant can of worms all in itself. By that logic, you can always justify any kind of grading scheme, no matter how variable it is. For example, in a grade inflated class at a grade inflated school, getting 15% below the mean might mean just getting a B or even an A-. Getting 15% below the mean in a highly grade deflated class might mean getting an F. Why the difference? After all, they're both getting scoring below the mean, so why does one person get a radically different grade from another person? Who's really to say that one person really "deserves" the grade he got? </p>
<p>
[quote]
Is this supposed to be some huge relevation? The more you know, the better the grade you get (in most cases) regardless of whether the class is curved. It's far easier to spend some time raising your own average by 15% then to try to bring down the mean of a 600-person class by 15%. Instead of worrying about how curves work, the OP and anyone else in college should worry about doing their best. Once you're in college, it doesn't take too long before you discover where you stand in relation to the other students
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, yes, in fact it is a gigantic revelation because it then introduces the (unfortunate but rational) practice of cherry-picking classes. Students learn to game the system for the purpose of boosting their GPA. For example, students won't take a particular class until it is taught by the one prof who is known for giving out high grade curves. Students start thinking of avoiding grade-deflated schools entirely like MIT and Caltech, and/or of avoiding grade-deflated majors like engineering. People start hunting down easy classes in order to rack up a long string of A's. I know people who were completely fluent in a foreign language, but took all the intro courses in that language anyway, just to get a bunch of easy A+'s. They didn't learn a damn thing, but they didn't care, all they wanted were top grades to make themselves look good to the med-school adcoms. It worked too - they got in. </p>
<p>The point is that the fact that grading schemes are so highly variable simply encourages gamesmanship. Curves make the grade completely arbitrary. Some curves are set high. Others are set low. Some classes are filled with extremely hard working geniuses making it extremely difficult to beat the curve. Others are filled with lazy drunk frat boys making it extremely easy to beat the curve. There is no true standard. People, knowing that they need high grades to get into med-school, then inevitably start gaming the system. They start playing the game to find where they can get the highest possible grades with the least possible effort.</p>
<p>how do you get quotes in that dark box?</p>
<p>[<em>quote]how do you get quotes in that dark box?[</em>/quote]
Minus the astericks...
[quote]
how do you get quotes in that dark box?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>[<em>quote=stonecold23]how do you get quotes in that dark box?[</em>/quote]
Minus the astericks...
</p>
<p>norcalguy,</p>
<p>The important point here is in orgo classes in many colleges, the grade for 15% below the mean (using your example) is usually a C instead of the usual B/B-.</p>
<p>One of my good friends who is pretty bright and did well on orgo but managed to get just a B+ because so few A/A- were given. This is a guy who got accepted to HS but went to Northwestern for HPME. He also took MCAT without studying very hard (just for fun since HPMEs are guaranteed admission to NU med school) and got a very solid score (36).</p>
<p>Is that a bad thing? 15% is substantially below the mean. In fact, 15% is high enough to be an entire std. dev on most tests. If you're in the bottom 16% of your class, you deserve a C. That kind of curve alone cannot justify the difficulty of orgo because such a curve is very fair.</p>
<p>As for your friend, perhaps he just isn't as strong in orgo as he is in other subjects. I've certainly accumulated my share of B's in 5 semesters at Cornell, none of which was in orgo. Does that prove orgo at Cornell is a piece of cake? Not based on the opinions of some of my peers.</p>
<p>norcalguy,</p>
<p>This is really NOT that hard to understand yet you are making it difficult. 15% is just a DUMMY number and it doesn't have to be more than 1 std dev below the mean. LOL! The point was a 15% (3% if that makes it easier) below the mean in orgo would be a C whereas in most other classes, it would be something better, like B-. What grade does a person get if he gets the mean in the orgo class at Cornell? According to <a href="http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/10436%5B/url%5D">http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/10436</a>, the avearge GPA for all classes at Cornell is around 3.34 (B+). Is the mean for the orgo class B+? I'd be very surprised if it is not significantly lower than that.</p>
<p>As for my friend not being strong in orgo, that's a nondefensible statement and you are entitled to your opinion. However, I very much doubt a person not strong in Orgo could have gotten 36 on MCAT (higher than average for Harvard med school admit) without even studying all that hard for it.</p>
<p>I agree with Sam Lee. The problem is really with the shifting standards of grading. Basically, there is no consistent standard. Being 15% below the mean might translate to a C in some classes in certain schools. It might translate to a B in some classes. It might translate to a D or an F. Heck, sometimes it might even translate into an A- (which is what happened to a guy I once knew who took a highly grade inflated class. He was a full standard deviation below the mean of the total score of a class and he still got an A-, and he was laughing about it later. Basically, nobody in the class got lower than an A-. And this was an engineering class at MIT, no less). </p>
<p>So, again, the real problem is the inconsistent grading. Sometimes you really can do very little work, not understand the material at all, and get an A anyway. Sometimes you can work extremely hard, understand the material extremely well and still get a D or an F.</p>
<p>sakky i pmd you, what do u do for a living ? are u a student? whats ur income? whered u go to college? just wondering these random questions</p>
<p>I tend not to answer personal questions unless I see a good reason for doing so.</p>
<p>well starting from the bottom up, i was thinking the same thing as stonecold...well not in that much detail but i was wondering where u go to school?</p>
<p>No offense but some of the things you said sounded a bit ridiculous.....</p>
<p>First of all i think it is important to mention that i go to "a grade inflated school" as sakky would say.</p>
<p>To start off with my two cents in this discussion about curves, I find curves to be VERY fair and I find anyone who blames the curve for the grade they got is simply trying to find a scapegoat for their own shortcomings. The way a curve is done is that the average letter grade is determined....in my "grade inflated" school that usually ranges from a B+ in some physics and math courses I've taken to a C+ in some engineering courses that I will be taking. Next it is determined whether a standard deviation away from that mean will be a third of a letter grade, two thirds, or a full letter grade. If you guys remember from your high school math, 1 standard deviation encompasses approximately 67% of the class while two SDs encompass about 99%. From this explanation you can clearly see that not all curves will be the same....they will differ from class to class and from school to school. Furthermore, yes, it is true that a curve means that you are "competing against the other students" but it is also a way to compensate for the difficulty of the test! Say, for example, you study for 100 hrs for an orgo exam (this is alot for all u overachievers) and then u walk into a midterm knowing the material down COLD and I as the teacher hand out an exam that is so ridiculously easy that the guy who studied for 10 hrs pulls a 90 and you get a 100, and the average was a 95......does that mean everyone gets an A? is this fair to the person who studied much more but could not show it any more because the test was so easy. Alternatively, say we use the same two people but this time the test is EXTREMELY hard....person who studied alot gets a 40% and person who studied little gets 25%....does this mean that you both get Fs? Does the first get a D and the other get an F? is it your fault that the test was really hard or really easy? Then again with a curve, the difficulty of the test is normalized against the performance of the students and i think that is the best way to be fair in science and math classes since professors sometimes cannot really predict how simple or difficult a test will be and thus the best way to set a fair grading scheme is by the performance of the class. When someone says that the curve failed them, that is BS....for example sakky's friend who got an 80 and the avg was a 95.....its not the "curve's fault" that he got a bad grade, its just that the test was easy but he didnt know as much as he needed to to do well....if there was no curve this would be penalizing the individuals who did well and the test just happened to be super easy just as in the first example i gave. The only thing that can be deemed unfair about a curve is the median grade, but however, this can be justified (and i know alot of people are going to disagree with me about this) by the fact that at more prestegious/selective schools, the student body is assumed to be more intelligent/hard working and thus those who do average deserve to get a better grade than those who do average at a less selective school where either the tests are not as hard or the competition is not as tough.</p>
<p>Haven't posted in a while, but Sakky is not a bitter person who lost out on the grading system; he actually did fairly well for himself but likes to go on diatribes on schools he thinks are grade-deflated.</p>
<p>In particular, Caltech forces two terms of pass/fail during frosh year: an amazing screen for those who wish to use maximally.</p>