<p>I'm a high school student in IB Biology, and I was wondering what makes college Organic Chemistry hard.</p>
<p>Thanks for your answers.</p>
<p>it just is...</p>
<p>That's not very helpful...</p>
<p>It's a different way of thinking about things. I found gen chem to be very math heavy, while there was none in organic chemistry. It is also a field that I think lends itself to memorization, but that's not the best way to learn it, but b/c it presents itself that way, students try to memorize everything rather than understand.</p>
<p>Oh..how important is memorization as a pre-med student or a med student?</p>
<p>why are you worried about organic chem and your still in hs?</p>
<p>Indeed. Just concentrate on your high school courses. There will be time enough to worry about organic chem once you are in college.</p>
<p>Just because a bunch of people say something is "hard" doesn't mean it is or it will be for you. Many people find the "easy" stuff hard and the "hard" stuff easy.</p>
<p>I'm not worrying about it, I'm just curious because I have seen many threads saying 'I got a B or B- in Organic Chem, will this hurt my chances at med school?'</p>
<p>Just curious, thats all.</p>
<p>no.........</p>
<p>It's just different from what most people learn in high school. In o-chem, you learn basic reactions and strategies and have to synthesize your knowledge in order to solve a complex problem. It involves both memorization and critical thinking/problem solving. It's not something where problems are the same every time, and it's definitely not plug and chug.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I'm a high school student in IB Biology, and I was wondering what makes college Organic Chemistry hard.
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</p>
<p>Frankly, it's not the material that makes OChem hard. After all, there is far less math in OChem than in most other technical courses. And the memorization you have to do is, I would argue, clearly no worse than what is necessary in, say, an intro foreign language course. Especially if you're going to be learning, say, an Asian language, you better be ready for some serious memorization. </p>
<p>Yet not many people go around around fretting that they are going to flunk Chinese 101.</p>
<p>The REAL problem of OChem is therefore not really the material. It is the * grading *. The grading of OChem in many schools is such that you can know the material extremely well...and get a terrible grade anyway, because of the harshness of the grade curve. I remember back at my school, OChem classes were actually mandated to give out no more than 40-45% of A's or B's, which mean that the majority of the students would end up with C's or worse. Contrast that with the Chinese classse at my school where it was extremely rare for anybody to get a final grade lower than a B. his is why you also have the constant infighting and cutthroat behavior of the students because they are all fighting for the limited number of good grades that are given out. When you have 2 starving people and only 1 plate of food, they are inevitable going to battle over it.</p>
<p>Oh..thanks a lot sakky.</p>
<p>I've been told it's hard because you have to be able to visualize and mentally rotate three-dimensional molecular structures.</p>
<p>
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It involves both memorization and critical thinking/problem solving.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>As Sakky stated, the memorization for organic is of the same magnitude as learning a foreign language; Most pre-meds, by the time they get to organic, are very good at memorization; organic, however, requires more than brute force memory skills.</p>
<p>Here are some comments from a UT instructor:
[quote]
Understand the answers to the problems and relate the new ideas and concepts to those you have learned. Although there are some things like nomenclature and reagents that simply have to be memorized, you must comprehend the fundamental principles, such as electron rich species (bases) attack electron deficient species (acids) and electronic and steric effects. The more you understand, the less you have to memorize. The key to success is to drill until you have mastered the principles and concepts. If you feel you must memorize, repeated drilling is also important. Remember, if you memorize something and then forget it in the panic-state exams typically induce, you are lost. If you understand concepts, you can figure out the answer should your memory fail.
[/quote]
<a href="http://courses.cm.utexas.edu/jgilbert/ch310m/fall2004/success.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://courses.cm.utexas.edu/jgilbert/ch310m/fall2004/success.pdf</a></p>
<p>Organic Chemistry is perhaps the only "hard" science course that pre-meds take, since most pre-meds are not scientists by choice or nature. If you learn concepts and structures first, the details will fall into place.</p>
<p>agreed on the grading - my ochem instructor put everyone on a standard bell curve so only about ~5% received A's, so only about 5-10 student out of 200 got them depending on where the natural breaks occurred in the score groupings (since he didn't do actual statistical analysis on the scores to make it legit).</p>
<p>"I've been told it's hard because you have to be able to visualize and mentally rotate three-dimensional molecular structures."</p>
<p>It is true that this is a necessary skill to do well in organic chemistry. OTOH, I never thought this was a particular talent of mine, but I found it fun and easy to do when I took organic. I even went on to take a completely optional advanced organic chem. class. Here is an important warning, though. For me, at least, the ability to visualize in 3D--important for stereochemistry--was quite dependent on getting a decent amount of sleep before the exam. On one occasion, I thought it was necessary to stay up half the night studying for an advanced 0-chem exam; in my sleep-deprived state, I turned everything around backwards in my head and really blew the test. I suspect that is why many college students don't do well in organic--they just don't get enough sleep.</p>
<p>Organic, analytical, even p-chem are all a lot more interesting than general (inorganic) chem. I tell my teenagers this all the time when they whine that chemistry is uninteresting, but I don't think they believe me. I hope you do.</p>
<p>In my experience, orgo was not only heavy on memorization but more importantly, heavy on understanding--which is what made it hard. Our exams were notoriously tricky in the sense that you could have memorized all the chapters and practiced all the chapter problems...and still have failed if you couldn't apply the concepts to problems that you have never seen before.
That being said, if you did better than most people in the class, you got your well-deserved good grade.
I agree, organic is much more interesting than gen chem, but it is also much more time-consuming.</p>
<p>I would completely agree! Organic is a completely different way of thinking. It requires a lot of memorization, and it also requires a pretty firm understanding of some pretty non-concrete concepts. It is not an easy by course by any means. Organic Chemistry is often a course that tends to root people out and change their majors. If you can handle a rough work load on top of lots of memorization, then you’ll be all-set. Good luck!</p>
<p>Yes, please don’t stress yourself about Organic. You will not even encounter it until you’ve completed a least a year of general chemistry.</p>