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Your midterm score and lab report average score have been posted to Blackboard. You will receive your midterm back during your next lab session. For midterm exam and course grading stats, visit the Grades Fall 2011 page on the CHEM 233 course website.
After you receive your midterm exam, carefully check for mistakes or addition errors. If you believe there is a grading error, first consult your TA and if they agree then submit your exam for review according to the instructions in the handout (exam_corrections.pdf) posted on the File Sharing Page of the orgo labs website. You must submit your exam directly to Dr. L by Friday, October 28 for it to be considered for corrections. No exam will be accepted or corrections made after that date.
Finally, if you would like more information on your standing in the course or are concerned about your performance, please stop by during office hours (M,W; 3-5 p.m.) as soon as possible so that we can discuss strategies for improving your grade. Little can be done at the end of the semester. With over 300 points remaining in the course, however, you can still make significant improvements if you are not meeting your current goals.
A large focus of exam 2 and the final exam will be on devising syntheses of organic molecules. This is a skill that must be practiced in order to master. To help you prepare for those synthetic challenges, I've posted two handouts on the course website's File Sharing page (synthesis_689.pdf & synthesis_10112.pdf) that describe common synthetic strategies and provide several synthetic challenges for practice. In order to encourage you to work on these, I am going to pull SOME of the synthesis questions for exam 2 and the final exam directly from these two handouts, with no modifications. Some of the synthesis questions, of course, will be original. That's not an encouragement to memorize every synthesis in the handouts, however. It won't work; there are too many. Rather, practice applying the retrosynthesis technique we're learning in class to each problem and then do them all over again. Start working on them early. Don't procrastinate! And try to have fun. Once you've mastered synthesis you can finally say you're an organic chemist--if only for a semester.
Congratulations to my student, Richard Marszalek, on his recent publication describing the NMR tube cleaner we developed (Landrie, C.L.; Marszalek, R.M. A Durable and Economical NMR Tube Cleaner. J. Chem. Educ. [Online early access]. DOI: 10.1021/ed200104v. Published Online: October 4, 2011.) This apparatus can be constructed in less than 15 minutes from easily obtainable materials in the lab and at a significantly lower cost than the fragile glass apparatuses sold by commercial vendors.
A study guide (midterminfo_233F11.pdf) has been posted for the CHEM 233 midterm exam on the course website's File Sharing page. The study guide includes the essay questions that will appear on the exam so that you may prepare for these in advance. Again, the midterm exam will be given during your regularly scheduled lab time the week of October 11-17.
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