Module Review: CM1502 (AY17/18 Semester 2)

CM1502 General and Physical Chemistry for Engineers is a 4 MC module that focuses on molecular spectroscopy, kinetics, equilibria and linking these concepts to various industries. I would say I had the most ups and downs when taking this module, as compared to the other mods in this semester. (Get ready for a rant, I have a number of complaints for this module. But, I'm just gonna say that these are my opinions and it may or may not represent the opinions of everyone else who took this module.)

Assessment

20% Quizzes (3 in total)
10% Lecture Quiz Questions (participation marks) 
20% Lab Work
50% Final Exams (on Examplify, open book)

Lecturer: A/Prof CHIN Wee Shong

Tutor: Zhu Ziyu

Lab: Various Lab technicians

Textbook
Chemistry - the Molecular Nature of Matter and Change, 7th Edn., Silberberg and Amateis, McGraw-Hill Education, 2015.

Definitely not a must to get this textbook. A lot of such content can be found online in other websites.

Lectures

Lectures were 2 hours long on Monday, 3 - 5 pm, but we always end pretty early like around 4/4.15 pm. The thing about this module is that there would be online lecture webcasts to watch first (about 1-2 hours per week) before attending the lecture. (just like MA1512 and MA1513) The online lecture basically explains most of the content we need to know and going to physical lectures are like a chore. We needed to attend the physical lectures as there were questions to answer (via SMS) during the lecture. If not, I seriously doubt any of us would attend the lecture. Furthermore, the lecture notes are very brief, like some form of revision notes, and it wasn't easy understanding the concepts unless we read up more online. This is the main problem of the module imo. (Like most of the content I learnt and understood was from Wikipedia. Ya you heard me right. Wikipedia.) The lecturer also didn't really explain the concepts well. Everything was very brief and along with reading Wikipedia, I had to watch online videos with regards to the content I wasn't sure of. It was really annoying especially for the very new concepts like IR spectra, H-NMR spectra etc. 

Tutorial

There are only 4 tutorials for this module and each tutorial were 1 hour long. We have tutorial questions to attempt before attending the tutorial. Well, my tutor for my tutorial timeslot was a graduate student (I may be wrong here but she definitely isn't a prof. And you might not get the same tutor as me so our experiences may differ a little here and there). Well, her voice was kinda soft and she wasn't totally sure of some of the concepts as well. But the good thing is that she would help us check on the questions we asked and she would email us after the tutorial with explanations to the questions we asked. 

Another problem with this module is that there were no solutions posted for the tutorial questions. I mean the intention might be for us to listen well during tutorials but sometimes, there might not be enough time to explain every single question in depth and it would be very very helpful to have at least a brief solutions to the tutorial questions. 

Laboratory Work
There were a total of 3 three hour long lab sessions. One focused on titration, one on IR spectroscopy and one on absorbance. For the first two sessions, we were only required to fill up a lab worksheet while for the last one, we were required to write a full lab report which includes an intro, procedure, results, discussion etc etc. Each lab session took place in different laboratories in Faculty of Science. We were then graded based on the worksheets and report submitted.

We were a little lost when we first started each lab but I would say that the lab technicians/professors were really helpful (the sad thing is that I can't remember any of their names). When we had any issues, we could easily approach them and they would spend time to explain where we went wrong and how we can improve on our experiments. 

Quizzes
As for the quizzes and final exams, we were to attempt all of such tests on the online platform known as examplify. Well, the future is here. We are doing our exams on our laptops now. Here comes the problem. We had 3 quizzes in total. 2 to be attempted "at home" and 1 to be attempted during one of the lectures. The ones to be attempted at home can obviously be discussed so i have no issues with that. Now, comes the one we had to do during lecture. Well, we had the quiz in an LT and guess what happened? Obviously, people cheated during the quiz and used their phones to chat when profs were not looking. There was even one student who submitted the quiz after he went back to hall (lol this one really dem fail cos our prof can detect which part of school we are at when submitting the file). As such, we had to do a re-test again (which means more time spent on revision). What I felt was kinda dumb was that we were using laptops and we were in an LT. This clearly meant that those sitting on top can see the answers of those who are sitting below them! 

Ok, now back to content, all the 3 quizzes are MCQ or MRQ (multiple response, where we had to choose a few options out of the many given, as compared to just choosing 1 correct answer for MCQ). They were all rather manageable fortunately so long as revision was done.

The good thing about the quizzes and final exam was that it was all open book. So, we could refer to our notes and do the paper. 

Final Exam

Thankfully, for the final exam, we were separated into 3 different LTs and we could sit with a gap in between us. Each of us had a plug to charge our laptops. The final exam not only had MCQ and MRQ questions. It also had 2 essay questions and 4 structured questions. Well, the structured questions only required the answers and no working was needed. This was kinda sad in my opinion because our working could be perfect but if we typed a number wrongly in our calculator or we did last step wrongly, then we would lose all the marks for that question. 

Timewise, we were given 2 hours for the paper which was in my opinion, sufficient to complete the paper. 

Expected Grade: A

Final Grade: A+

Final Comments

To be really really honest, I was very thankful that I could do so well for this module. I guessed I consistently went online to search about anything that I wasn't sure of and this has helped in strengthening my concepts and knowledge about physical chemistry (irony, isn't it). 

Stay tuned for more updates.

- Alan