CHM 414: COURSE GRADING

The two mid-term exams will be “open book” – you may use any published materials or databases, plus your own class notes and homework solutions. This long-standing policy is intended to encourage creative problem solving and discourage memorization of mathematical equations and physical constants that can be easily looked up. Each exam will cover material up through the chapters assigned the previous week (e.g. Exam #1 on 2/27 will cover chapters 1 through 11 and 22-25; and Exam #2 on 4/17 will concentrate on chapters 12 through 21.).

The scheduled final exam will also be “open book,” and will cover the entire semester’s material, but with emphasis on chapters 26 through 34.

Your oral presentation will consist of a talk supported by blackboard, overhead or Power Point illustrations (20-30 minutes), followed by a question and answer period (5-10 minutes). You may choose a particular chemical analytical instrument or instrument application that interests you and that covers an assigned chapter or chapter section from the text, subject to the instructor's approval.  Please submit your topic preference as soon as possible, but no later than Thursday, February 1; if two or more students request the same topic, the first one to select it will get it.

Laboratory reports will be graded on the quality of the work performed and recorded in the lab and also on the quality of the written analysis and discussion (the report). Reports should follow the format of an ACS journal article (title/authors, abstract, introduction and background, experimental details, data and analysis, results and conclusions, acknowledgements, footnotes and references). Instead of copying over detailed experiment instructions, you may simply reference the written source of those instructions. But be sure to record along with your data any changes you made in procedures, the specific things you observed and important details about variables.