CM2122 - ORGANIC CHEMISTRY

Academic Year 22/23 - Semester 2

Assessments:​

• Lab Reports: 20% 

• Test 1 (A/P Ge): 30% 

• Finals (A/P Lam): 50% 

Lecturer: A/P Ge Shaozhong & A/P Lam Yulin

Lab Instructor: Dr Hoang Truong Giang 

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Course Overview: 

• Spectroscopic Techniques (IR, 1H and 13C NMR, MS) 

• Organic Chemistry Reactions 

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No. of Responses : 5

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Workload of Course (Average number of hours spent per week)

To learn the content: 4h 

To complete assignments: 1.8h  

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REVIEWS

How did you find the contents (e.g. how it was delivered) and the assessments of the course? 
 

On the difficulty of content, I would say it's pretty manageable. Since I took both H3 Chem and SChO before most topics were not new to me. Those in H3 Chem or Olympiad history will find this course quite manageable. 

 

Contents of 2122 for spectroscopy were manageable and fun to learn. However organic was difficult in terms of the large amount of content and the pace was too fast to keep up (too much content cramped in a short period of time). 

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Part 1: physical lecture but recorded  

Part 2: pre-recorded webcasted lectures  

Some lectures will take you more than 2 hours, sometimes 3 hours to finish watching because of the heavy content. 

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The course is divided into two halves. Prof Ge teaches the first half on spectroscopy. This part focuses on IR and NMR. The midterm was basically completely IR and NMR though. The second half is taught by Prof Lam, which were the organic reactions. The lectures follow Clayden quite closely, but Prof Lam also mentions some reactions that are not in Clayden (don't make the same mistake as me and just read Clayden, please watch the lectures). 

 

Labs were taught by Dr Hoang. He gives a quick briefing before every lab session, and usually a second briefing somewhere in the middle of lab. Don't worry too much if you miss a briefing or you forget something though, cuz the TAs and Dr Hoang are quite helpful. Dr Hoang will tell you that you can go for lunch and leave your experiment running, which sounds really enticing given the lab slot is 10-4, but most of the time your experiments will end before 4pm anyway so don't worry if you don't find time for lunch.

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How was your experience in the course? 

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A/P Ge Shaozhong (Spectroscopy) & A/P Lam Yulin (Organic Reactions) are both well-versed in their respective fields. They are approachable if one has any questions. However, I do find the lectures were slightly dry. Dr Hoang Truong Giang was very helpful during the lab components of the course. You can count on him to help you out during lab if you have any issues. I found the bell curve for this course to be quite tough, as the final at 50% basically determines your final grade. This means that if you do not perform for the final paper, it’s quite likely to find an unexpectedly poor grade. However, with consistent practice and hard work, it is not difficult to obtain a good grade for this course. 

 

I liked the spectroscopy portion because I came out of lectures learning things, it was fun to apply the knowledge learnt as prof gives good extra questions to test understanding. The organic chemistry part had little guidance and it’s quite challenging.

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I really enjoyed learning organic chem, especially how it is linked to our everyday lives. prof Ge is very passionate in his teachings, and he made me look forward to attending the lectures even though it’s at 8am! some concepts taught were slightly similar to JC chem so it’ll be great if you have some JC H2 Chem background! 

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Prof Ge and Prof Lam are quite helpful profs, as long as you approach them with questions. Prof Ge repeated one part in the NMR slides like 3 times because we couldn't understand (probably why MS became half a lecture) so they will really try and help you understand the concepts better. 

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