<p>Is there an advantage/disadvantage to the writing component? Also is there a large discrepancy in the level of difficulty between these 2 professors?</p>
<p>Additionally this is for the pre-med req so am I suppose to pick the one without the writing component or does it matter?</p>
<p>You can do 205 or 206 - the writing component doesn’t matter for pre-med, you just have to meet certain writing component requirements throughout your college career so they offer you the option on various courses. My understanding of the labs is that even if it says Allen or Huq as the professor, they sort of rotate on lectures so you may have several different lecturers over the course of the semester. This may have changed, but that’s how it was explained to me from friends who’ve already taken it.</p>
<p>Yeah I had Allen, Huq, and Brand each for about 6 weeks during lectures for 205L even though the course is listed as being taught by Allen in fall '09. I don’t remember it being listed as having a writing component but if it did, it was probably because of all the lab reports that we did.</p>
<p>Were the lab reports difficult or graded hard? And how was the difficulty of the class?</p>
<p>Anymore comments?</p>
<p>I’d like to know about it’s difficulty too! :D</p>
<p>The lab wasn’t hard, just tedious and took forever (lab is 4 hours, once a week). You buy the lab manual written by the 3 lecturers at the co-op and will want to keep it in a binder. You’ll read 1-3 chapters of background for the experiments each week and take a 5 question multiple choice CPS quiz at the beginning of each lab over what you read. Be sure to read carefully because the questions may ask in what specific order the steps of the experiment are, or it’ll describe a solution and you need to know it’s name/molarity/ingredients, things like that. You get 3 of these quizzes dropped I believe, but it’s easy to fail with only 5 questions so again, read carefully. </p>
<p>The labs themselves are easy, each step is in the lab manual. The lab instructor/TA are usually very helpful with any questions about procedures or how to use certain instruments. Expect to be working the full 4 hours, it usually takes all 4 members of the group to complete the lab in time. Sometimes you just have to wait for solutions to cool or something so we would just chat or start the analysis. </p>
<p>After the lab, you have a week to work on the lab analysis with your group. The analysis are pretty basic questions, asking molarity or simple calculations, or what your group’s results were and what happened. Analysis can take a while so get those done early. You’ll also have a 1 hour lecture once a week sometime before your lab. Those are boring and you’ll have 2 easy CPS questions there as well. The lab practicum is a 6 experiment/question final, and it’s a b****. Study past tests for the questions and be sure you know how to quickly/accurately use all the instruments before going into the practicum for the hands-on experiment portion. The whole thing lasts about 30-40 minutes and there’s about 6 people from your class, 1 at each table working on a section, and you rotate so you each get through all 6 experiments. A lot of people fail it. It’s easy to make a B in the class, tougher to make an A, but definitely manageable.</p>
<p>Did you get to choose your own group? And about how long did your average lab report take?</p>
<p>Yes you can sit with whomever you like. After the first 2 labs or so, you pretty much stay with the same group. I got to know nearly everyone in my lab class since we were all in a FIG though. Lab analysis would usually take anywhere from 2-3 hours, more or less.</p>