| Dr. Chris Stevenson GSC C-209, 289-8635 |
Office Hours MWF 10-11am R 10:30-11:30am By appointment |
Textbook Stevenson, Quantitative Chemical Analysis: An Integrated Approach |
The following textbooks are recommended as references and supplemental reading.
|
||||||||||
If you haven't noticed it yet, this course is quite lab intensive. The lab component of the course will account for 35% of your grade. A large portion of your lab grade will be determined by the quality of your experimental data (i.e., the accuracy and precision of your data) and by your data manipulation skills (i.e., the calculations by which you convert your raw data into the desired result). What this means is that you need to be careful, both in lab and in the calculation of your results. It will pay to be prepared before coming to lab. If you understand the experiment before you do it, then you are far less likely to make mistakes. Other than studying for tests, most of the work outside the classroom will be connected with the experiments you perform in the lab component of the course: writing abstracts and lab reports.
Despite the best attempt to do otherwise, there will be some experiments that will be performed before we can teach the relevant material in class lectures. In particular, the spectroscopy experiments in the round-robin sequence will almost certainly be performed before we can discuss spectroscopy in class. For this reason, the write-up for each experiment will have several pages that discuss, in condensed form, the relevant principles that underlie the experiment. You are strongly encouraged to read this material; it will significantly increase your effectiveness in the laboratory (in other words, you will have a much better chance of knowing what's going on in lab!).
Despite the importance of the experiments, as much as possible, I would like grade pressure to be removed from this exercise but I am not naïve. If you make a "good-faith effort" in lab -- attend all experiments, turn in all your assignments on time, and demonstrate a reasonable knowledge of the lab material before conducting the experiment as well as a commitment to improving your lab technique -- then I will guarantee that your lab grade will not harm your course grade if you are achieving A/A- grades on the tests, and for other students it will likely help (or at least not harm) your course grade.
There will be two types of homework assignments: pre-lecture questions based on laboratory experiments designed to serve as a starting point to discuss new topics in lecture, and optional practice problems designed to help prepare for test calculations.
Before new lecture subjects you will usually be required to read the "Theory in Brief" and "Experiment in Brief" sections of an assigned laboratory experiment that is relevant to the topic at hand, and then answer a few questions related to this material. Your answers to these pre-lecture questions should be accurate but not overly long; each assignment should take you 30-60 min and your submission must fit on one page. Although you may discuss the material with your classmates, the submission must be your own work; do not cut and paste material from the textbook or the lab manual or any other source. Submit your answers to Blackboard as a Word, Pages or PDF document.
Answers to pre-lecture questions will not be graded for accuracy. As long as they represent your own work and fit on one page (and are submitted on time), they will receive full credit. However, as an inducement to answer these questions well, they will be available to you to use during in-class tests. You will not be able to correct or otherwise alter your answers after you have submitted them, however. If you pre-lecture submissions are more than one page long, only the first page will be included in your "test packet."
Practice problems will often be taken from previous tests and will include the answer (but not how to obtain it). These submissions will NOT be available to you for use during tests. These practice problems are optional and will count as extra credit to your homework grade. A single practice problem assignment is worth up to one-half a pre-lecture assignment; however, one may not have greater than 100% on their homework grade in the course.
Late submissions of pre-lecture questions or practice problems will not be accepted and will receive a zero. If you have an acceptable excuse for not submitting answers to pre-lecture questions then there will be no grade penalty, though they will still not be included in your test packet unless we have not covered the material yet in class.
Although your presence is expected in class, no attendance will be taken (except for the first few classes to check the roll). You are responsible for all announcements and material covered in class. Any missed tests will count as zero points unless it is an excused absence, i.e., illness, participation in a scheduled University event, family emergency, etc.) which should be cleared with me before or immediately following the missed class.
All laboratory experiments, as well as the associated abstract lab reports, must be completed in order to complete this course. Experiments that are missed due to an excused absence can be performed at a later date without penalty; an unexcused absence from lab results in a zero for the missed experiment.
If a student misses a significant number of lectures, such that I feel that his/her work is affected, I will notify the student's advisor and residential college dean.