Another difference in law school and grad school was the intensity of classes towards the semester's end. In law school, the professors have throttled back a little. They're teaching us new stuff but not with the same rigor as earlier in the semester.
In chemistry, it was quite different. Not only did the intensity level remain steady up until the last day of class, but we had one professor who had us come in for a couple of lectures after classes had officially ended. Since our exam was on the last day of the exam period, the guy thought it was a bright idea to bring us in and lay some more info on us.
The most unkind cut was his assertion that the info we learned in the post-class period would only have a bit part on the final. Unfortunately, this subject, kinetics and mechanisms of radical reactions, constituted 1/4 of the exam. I could have shit a brick when I saw that!
However, I got the last laugh. Seven months later, another organic professor wrote a cumulative exam based on the JACS paper that the radical kinetic/mechanistic question from our exam in the first semester. I was the only student to go over the JACS paper after the exam; I was also the only student who got a full pass on that cume.
No comments:
Post a Comment