Figured I'll revive the unit ranting/simping thread from the old forums available here: https://archive.atarnotes.com/forum/index.php?topic=43048.0. I'll publish my reviews for sem 1 when the results come out.
Mods can edit this post to provide an indexing functionality just like the old thread.
Mod edit (AW 31/12/23): Thanks for your hard work Billzene. 
INDEX
Subject Code/Name: MTH1020 – Analysis of change
Workload:
3 x 1 hr lectures
1 x 2 hr applied class
Assessment:
5 x 6% assignments
4% lecture poll participation
6% applied class participation
60% final exam
Recorded Lectures: Yes, with screen capture
Past exams available: Yes, sem 1 2021 and sem 1 2022, in addition to a mock exam of indeterminate year. Only sem 1 2021 and the mock exam had full solutions. Sem 1 2022 only had solutions for the multiple choice and “enter a number in the box” questions, but not for the extended response ones requiring extensive working out as per school of maths policy.
Textbook Recommendation:
Stewart’s calculus, didn’t buy
MTH1020 lecture notes, also didn’t buy as it was available in electronic form on Moodle
Lecturer(s): Dan Mathews (unit coordinator)
Year & Semester of completion: 2023 Sem 1
Rating: 5 out of 5
Your Mark/Grade: 92 HD
Comments:
Overall impression and lecture content (including lecture polls): While MTH1020 is officially Monash’s own version of VCE specialist maths for those who didn’t do it, I’d call it diet spesh since there’s no way they can condense the entirety of spesh 3/4 into a 12-week semester. You start off with a crash course into complex numbers and vectors which are completely new topics if you only did methods 3/4 like me. Dan said they designed the course in this order on purpose because when they used to teach these unfamiliar topics in week 11-12, everyone gave up already by the time SWOTVAC rolls around as they’re too behind on lectures. You reach familiar territory in week 3-4 starting with a formal treatment of functions, which leads into limits and continuity that contain quite a lot of new content compared to VCE methods. The 2nd half of the course is a typical calculus course, with differentiability + differentiation, integration and differential equations (in addition to their applications in worded problems) being covered that extend quite a bit beyond the stuff you learned in methods. The new calculus techniques include various hacks to calculating limits, intermediate value theorem, squeeze theorem, implicit differentiation (including derivatives of inverse functions and logarithmic differentiation), the 2nd derivative + concavity, integration by substitution (including trigonometric substitutions), integration by partial fraction decomposition and volumes of solids of revolutions (washer and shell methods). Differential equations are supposed to be new, but by the time I finished studying the kinetics section of phys chem, I already knew what I’m doing.
In the lectures, Dan conducts Flux polls which are usually multiple-choice questions. You just need to answer them by the beginning of the subsequent week’s lectures for them to count towards your final grade, it doesn’t matter how wrong your answers are, as long as you answered them you get the marks. Polls are conducted for all 12 weeks, but only the top 10 weeks (0.4% each) count towards the 4% of MTH1020 mark dedicated to Flux polls.
Assignments: There are 5 x 6% assignments that are due on Tuesdays of weeks 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11 at 11:55pm. You get 2 weeks to do them and they’re really easy to near-full mark. The reason why I’m saying “near” is because they’re quite strict on assessing your mathematical communication and you have to explain every step using full sentences which is kinda annoying. My tutor didn’t want us working on our assignments during applied classes, so we relied on Dan or the maths learning centre to clarify any problematic questions that you can’t do with only your lecture notes. At the end of the semester, your assignments are great sources of revision.
Applied classes: All you had to do is rock up to applied classes and give a 5 minute TED talk to your group on your prepared solution for a question on the problem set (which you should have uploaded to the Moodle dropbox before coming to the applied class). After this, just look like you’re completing the other questions on the problem set. Applied classes last 2 hours and never finish early, which in my opinion, is way too long. A lot of biomed students and 1st-2nd year chem majors were enrolled in my applied class, so I usually end up spilling the tea to them during the 2nd hour and advising them on how to survive their units and what units to avoid like the plague if given the choice.
Your top 9 applied class marks (0.67% each) will count towards 6% of your MTH1020 mark. If you skip one applied class but still submit a prepared problem solution to Moodle, you can still recover 40% of the marks associated with that applied class.
Final exam: 190 minutes for 120 marks assessing all 12 weeks of lecture content. You’re permitted a double-sided A4 cheat sheet. I used my iPad to handwrite my entire cheat sheet on 2 A4 pages and then printed it out double-sided. It was kinda cramped since I had to include some worked examples of questions assessing content I’m a bit iffy about, but I was able to fit the entire course (including the wordy theory parts) into my cheat sheet. It probably gave me an extra 20-30 marks on the exam, but I felt the process of reviewing lecture notes and especially condensing the important parts when making the cheat sheet was equally critical to my revision.
A critical way I revised for the exam was using the Feynman technique, aka teaching concepts to others. In the week preceding the final, the Moodle discussion forums were inundated with people asking questions and I’d reply with my workings. When they reply to me asking me to elaborate on specific parts of my explanation, that’s when I’d flag these parts as something to study in detail because I didn’t effectively communicate them so that anyone can understand it. This whole exercise has the additional benefit of preparing me for the classroom as a future teacher. Dan will respond promptly to these questions as well, reading his comments was pretty helpful as I was able to identify which aspects of my explanation to others (and hence my understanding) were deficient.
The past and mock exams provided prepared us well for the final since they’re very indicative of the actual exam’s difficulty. The actual exam is harder than sem 1 2021, but both sem 1 2022 and the mock exam were considerably harder than the actual exam. The exam style has changed from 2021-2022. In previous years, many questions involved typing integers into boxes. I got many of these wrong/ran out of time when doing practise exams because it was time-consuming to rearrange my answers correctly into the required form. This isn’t an issue on the actual exam because 91 of the 120 marks available involved writing stuff down on paper and scanning it after the exam has finished. I really like the new format because you get methods marks (aka pity marks) just for writing anything down on the page that is relevant to solving the problem even if they’re not 100% accurate.
Most of the marks on the actual exam were very accessible (90 marks) but there were questions involving lots of fiddly, time-consuming and very error-prone computations (20 marks). I decided that they were more trouble than they’re worth so I speedran them to save time for checking my other answers. The 190 minute limit was more than enough to finish the paper and check for mistakes otherwise. Even though I had to refer to my cheat sheet a few times, I didn’t really feel rushed for time. I’ve back-calculated my exam mark to be 106/120 which means there was quite a bit of scaling going on as I didn’t think I’d get above 100/120. From this mark, I can also infer that they’re not very strict on assessing the mathematical communication of your responses so you don’t need as many full sentences when explaining your workings on the exam compared to your assignments.
Dan gave feedback on the final and I'll pop the stats here. Mean = 74.1/120, median = 75.0/120, SD = 24.6/120, max = 117.5/120.
Subject Code/Name: CHM3941- Advanced Inorganic Chemistry
Workload:
2 x 1 hr lecture-style workshops
1 x 1 hr problem-based workshop
1 x 4 hr lab (nominally 9 out of 12 weeks, but experiment 5 which has the lab booked for 3 weeks usually finishes within 2 weeks)
Assessment:
30% total from all labs
20% midsem
50% final exam
Recorded Lectures: Yes, with screen capture
Past exams available: No. Mock final exams available for Drasko’s and Phil’s sections.
Textbook Recommendation:
So many that I can’t remember, never bought any as the lecture notes already contain everything you need to know.
Lecturer(s):
Dave Turner (unit coordinator)
Drasko Vidovic
Phil Andrews
Year & Semester of completion: 2023 Sem 1
Rating: 2 out of 5
Your Mark/Grade: 87 HD
Comments:
Overall impression and lecture content: The unit starts off strong with Dave taking you for the first 4 weeks covering multinuclear NMR, magnetism and UV-vis. You have covered this stuff briefly in CHM1022 and CHM2911, but he takes you further. What’s new is that you’re now expected to predict NMR spectrum shapes for NMR-active nuclei that have spin numbers other than 1/2 (termed quadripolar nuclei), as well as those that have different isotopic abundances. Magnetism has some new content in the form of A, E and T molecular terms (determined by d e- configuration) and their effects on the experimental spin moment. UV-Vis was more or less a repeat of CHM2911, with Laporte’s rule covered again. Absolutely legendary delivery by Dave, but the experience was soured by a rather questionable midsem which I’ll discuss below.
Drasko’s content is on inorganic reaction mechanisms, which is heavily reliant on understanding trends. You’ll focus on the three major mechanisms of substitution in coordination complexes, associative, dissociative and interchange. I’d highly recommend drawing parallels to SN1 and SN2 reactions in organic chem, which really helped me understand these. To complicate things further, there are also associatively-activated and dissociatively-activated mechanisms, which are to do with the associative/dissociative nature of the mechanism’s rate-determining step. I noticed that Drasko sometimes uses the term “dissociative” when he’s talking about “dissociatively-activated” mechanisms, which initially caused a lot of confusion. However, as he showed the mechanism’s rate law derivations and from phys chem, the rate law is dependent on the slowest step, I was able to understand that he actually meant “dissociatively-activated”. You also look at some redox mechanisms for transition metal complexes towards the end of this section.
Phil has you for organometallics in the last 4 weeks of the semester. I didn’t like Phil’s delivery of the content because we didn’t cover many things in the first 2 weeks, then we were bombarded with tons new content from week 11 onwards. The way he puts a million research papers on Moodle was very intimidating, since this makes you think they’re all required readings. This was not the case, as long as you follow his organometallic knowledge checklist, you should be fine in theory. However practice, even with that checklist, it was very difficult knowing exactly what was examinable. Much of the content in Phil’s section was repeated from Cameron’s lectures in CHM2911, since making organometallic reagents involves some kind of salt elimination in 99% of cases. Remembering aggregation states/crystal structures was a massive pain, I didn’t have time to do it properly but I followed the general principles that the metals we covered are usually in tetrahedral geometries (4-coordinate) and that chelating ligands usually turn polymers into smaller monomers or dimers. The last bit of Phil’s lectures was highly reminiscent of Phil Chan’s 2911 lectures on carbonyl chemistry. It explores how you can use organometallic reagents to synthesise specific organic compounds. Half of the reactions in this section are variations of the Grignard addition to carbonyls you learned in 1st year, whereas the other half are similar to your enol/enolate alpha carbon reactions e.g. aldol condensation which were covered in 2911. I’m an organic boi at heart (probably from watching Breaking Bad) so I love using arrow mechanisms to understand the organometallic reactions, but Phil absolutely hates them when depicting organometallic mechanisms because “it doesn’t show you understand the thermodynamics behind organometallic reactions well enough”. While Phil’s idea of chemicals wanting to increase bond stabilities (e.g. when choosing between forming C-Li bonds and O-Li bonds, O-Li bonds will form) made sense, in time-pressured situations such as the exam, ain’t nobody got time to draw out a nice mechanism that shows all transition states and electrostatic interactions.
Labs: The lab program is split into 5 lab exercises. It’s the best part of this unit hands down, although this unit had the harshest lab marking out of all chem units I’ve done so far. The level of detailed demanded by the marking rubric also resulted in many all-nighters writing and perfecting reports. Each lab is labelled with the number of weeks it’s supposed to take, since the lab reports are weighed by this.
Lab 1 (1 week): Skills circuit where you use UV-vis, Gouy balance, IR spec and conductivity meter to characterise different coordination complexes. Proforma report, but still took me an all-nighter to complete since we have to include our original results on top of the model results we use if we have poor results.
Lab 2 (2 weeks): You’re asked to synthesise a specific cobalt complex that has a hexadentate macrocyclic ligand coordinated to it that we call “dinosaur”, because literature writes its trivial name as diNOsar. A typical follow-the-recipe lab, you characterise your complex using UV-Vis, IR, and conductivity meter. NMR spectra are provided to you on Moodle and interpreting them was very annoying, as were drawing the two required mechanisms. The report was marked strictly but that might just be cuz I did it on an all-nighter.
Lab 3 (2 weeks): You synthesise a cobalt complex that displays linkage isomerism and you measure the kinetics of isomerisation. From kinetic parameters, you’ll calculate activation parameters such as ∆H‡ and ∆S‡ which allow you to propose a plausible mechanism. You also have to characterise it using UV-Vis and IR.
Lab 4 (1 week): You titrate a bottle of n-butyllithium (n-BuLi) using two different indicators and compare results. You’re trained on how to use a Schlenk line for the first time.
Lab 5 (3 weeks, finished in 2): You react 2-chloropyridine with two different lithium-containing bases (an alkoxide superbase and LDA), after which you characterise both products to compare chemoselectivity, purity and regioselectivity using IR and H-NMR. Experiment finished in 2 weeks although the lab was booked for 3. Writeup was kinda annoying again but as long as you use the provided references, you’ll do decently.
Midsem: Closed book, 50 minutes for 40 marks on lecture content delivered by Dave. Hands down the most difficult midsem I’ve ever sat. It’s impossible to draw all predicted NMR spectra to scale and label them properly with coupling constants in the limited time we have. Worst of all, there were typos in a few of the NMR prediction questions that essentially prohibited us from using simplified assumptions. The practice questions taken from past exams provided to us stated explicitly what assumptions we’re allowed to make for the same kind of questions. The other questions on the midsem were pretty reasonable, I started with the magnetism and UV-vis questions when I realised that the NMR section might be problematic, but I didn’t get enough time to check over my answers.
No one in the group chat was happy with how the midsem went, not even the cracked lads walking around with 36-37/40. I was pretty grumpy about it as well because this midsem was scheduled on the same day as the phys chem midsem (thanks a lot Allocate /s). When I received my result, I think some dodgy questions were excluded from the marking or that our scores were scaled up, since there’s no way I got 32/40 with the numerous NMR questions I didn’t finish.
Final exam: Closed book, 130 minutes for 120 marks divided evenly between Drasko’s and Phil’s content. Although I heard from many previous students of this unit that the final will be extremely revolting, I didn’t find it bad at all. This is because the examinable content on the final has changed, since Dave’s content used to be on the final. Phil was talking about how the exam used to be extremely difficult because Dave’s section takes so long (I can definitely see this happening from my midsem experience) that by the time students got to his section (organometallics), everyone only had half an hour left or have given up completely. Back-calculating my exam mark, I got 105/120, which means there probably wasn't much scaling on as the exam was quite easy.
Although Drasko’s mock exam was not very relevant to the actual exam’s content as it included calculation questions involving the Eyring equation, he tells you during the SWOTVAC revision lecture what to focus on and what to ignore. In 2023, derivations of rate laws shown in lecture slides weren’t examinable. His section of the exam was pretty chill and exactly as expected. You’re asked to predict some trends and provide justifications for why you ranked the complexes the way you did. I forgot some trends so I just wrote down whatever I could think of.
Phil’s mock exam was very relevant to the actual exam. From past students’ experiences, Phil’s section of the final focused disproportionately on magnesium and zinc. This is certainly still the case, I reckon 1/3 of Phil’s section was on Mg and Zn, when we only spent 1.5 lectures on them (only 1 lecture and 0.5 of the SWOTVAC revision session). For reference, Phil’s lecture block consisted of 12 lectures in total. However, the mock exam also had more Mg and Zn questions than one would expect, so I decided to watch the 2021 recordings of the 4 Mg and Zn lectures and it paid off (make sure you know your Schlenk equilibrium and methods of activating Mg/Zn very well). The lithium questions were identical in style to the mock exam Phil provided. Protip: my TA’s PhD supervisor is Phil and he told me that Phil really loves asking a question about elements that you haven’t learned about in lectures, but belong to the same group e.g. he might ask you something about cadmium or mercury even though you only learned about zinc in the course. In addition to using the periodic table for this, you must also recognise the trends in carbon-metal bond covalency down the group and apply your knowledge of these to explain physical properties.
Subject Code/Name: CHM3930 – Medicinal Chemistry
Workload:
3 x 1 hr lectures
1 x 4 hr lab
Assessment:
30% labs
20% midsem
10% radiopharmaceutical assignment
40% final exam
Recorded Lectures: Yes, with screen capture
Past exams available: No, mock exams provided for Lisa and Andreas’ sections which were examinable on the final. Many past exam questions dispersed in check your understanding questions in lectures.
Textbook Recommendation: None
Lecturer(s):
Joel Hooper
Lisa Martin
Ben Fraser
Andrea Robinson (unit coordinator)
Year & Semester of completion: 2023 Sem 1
Rating: 5 out of 5
Your Mark/Grade: 96 HD
Comments:
Overall impression and lecture content: Hands down the best chem unit I took in the chem major. Supremely good organisation from Andrea and really interesting content for those coming from a bio/biomed background. A kid in my inorg lab who took this unit a year before me said Andrea designed it so that everyone will pass and nearly everyone will walk out with an HD. It’s definitely still the case this year.
Joel’s lectures cover drug discovery and pharmacokinetics. If you did the biomed units BMS2021 and BMS2062, or have done some pharmacology units in sci, 80%+ of this will be revision for you. I particularly enjoyed the way Joel explained the drug discovery process and how to screen drug candidates, because we were too busy surviving the horrendous theme tests in BMS2062 to understand drug discovery properly.
Lisa’s lectures cover biomolecules, antimicrobials and metals in medicine. Again, much of this will be revision from biomed core units, except you don’t need to know antibiotics and G-protein coupled receptors in as much detail. The metals in medicine series of lectures overlap heavily with CHM3941 ones on the trans effect. What’s kinda annoying is that Lisa got us to memorise the entire cytochrome P450 enzyme mechanism in detail. Although we learned it in Joel’s lectures, we weren’t expected to know the whole mechanism. Memorising random metal-containing drugs was pretty annoying as well, it was reminiscent of memorising all those antibiotics in BMS2052. Lisa’s delivery was OK, she got the job done and explained most things clearly.
Ben’s lectures last only one week and they’re on radiopharmaceuticals. Lots of interesting content to do with nuclear chem that’s not even covered in phys chem. It’s complex shit but he managed to simplify it so that a 5-year-old can understand it.
Andrea’s lectures the last month of the unit. She technically takes you for 2 topics, solid phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) and process chemistry. SPPS deals with synthesising artificial peptides and can be described as mechanism galore. You’re expected to know the Fmoc deprotection, amino acid activation and coupling reaction mechanisms including all side products in detail. You can use the identity of the side products to guide your study so it doesn’t have to be full-on memorisation. Process chem seems to be a diluted version of chem eng content, except I’d describe it as “common sense for drug lords medicinal chemists”. For example, you don’t want to be using overly toxic or flammable solvents and to save costs, you probably want to avoid intermediate isolation when you can (telescoping).
Midsem: 50 marks for 45 marks, examining all of Joel’s lectures (except for revision lecture content not covered in previous lectures). Most of the midsem was short answer, with very few multis. While the 2020 midsem was provided as practice material, our actual midsem was significantly easier than it. Just spam flashcards. In terms of scoring, I suspect that the midsem was scaled up, or that they were extremely lenient on marking the short answer questions.
Lab: There are 8 labs weighed equally, totalling to 30% of the overall grade. Like all other chem units, the lab component is a hurdle so if you get under 45%, you automatically fail the unit. Lab reports are due a week after your session at 11:55 pm, except for experiments that rely on analytical data return. A little about each lab:
Lab 1: You do some steam distillation to extract volatile oils from plants, identify the bioactive ingredients using GC-MS and evaluate their antibacterial activities. In past years it involved using some provided spices, but this year, we’re actually recruited as slave labour for a new skin care company. It ain’t one of those made-up scenarios either which is what I thought at first, an actual start-up asked us to analyse Australian native plants for use in skincare products which was pretty cool. Assessed by full writeup.
Lab 2: Friedel-Crafts acylation which you learned in 2911, except we’re actually allowed to use AlCl3 this year as we’re apparently mature enough as senior chem students. Assessed by an online Moodle quiz similar to the year 1 reports.
Lab 3: We use a vanadium complex as a catalyst to oxidise anthracene, which is supposed to simulate the action of CP450 enzymes involved in phase I metabolism of drugs. Assessed by an oral interrogation, our TA (Shahid) went really easy on us, he didn’t any ask any group more than 6 questions and the questions that he did ask weren’t out of left field either.
Lab 4: Another follow-the-recipe lab involving click chemistry between an azide and alkyne. Full report required, but it was due after the midsem break to give us time to study for the midsem.
Lab 5: A dry lab where you simulate the inhibition of bacterial transpeptidase with penicillin in a computer program called Molview, which is very similar to Pymol from BMS2062. Protip: don’t use a Mac for this lab, I had to use MoVE to access Molview which is Windows only, it was laggy as hell and failed to give me sensible results. Assessed by a worksheet with short answer questions, so you don’t have to write a full report for this.
Lab 6: Yet another follow-the-recipe lab where you get to synthesise two analogues of the cancer drug cisplatin. The literature for this lab was almost impossible to find, the whole cohort including me was running around like headless chickens and unable to find literature values to compare our results to. My lab partner in inorg, who happens to be the winner of the med chem unit prize, found literature values in very obscure places and sent it to us in the group chat so he single-handedly saved all 111 of us.
Lab 7: A really cool lab where you get to use solid phase peptide synthesis to couple an amino acid residue to an existing peptide chain. It took us 4 hours to do it which is very embarrassing considering Andrea later told us in the lecture that our TAs do SPPS in the lab as well but they can couple a residue in 2 minutes using really fancy equipment. We were meant to identify the unknown residue we coupled to the existing peptide, but someone in my lab session cross contaminated the unknown samples and consequently our mass spectra sometimes contained all 4 unknowns.
Lab 8: A typical organic lab where you’re asked to use organic wet tests and provided spectroscopic data to elucidate the structure of an unknown amino acid. I was lucky enough to have glutamine, but others were unfortunate enough to have phenylalanine.
Radiopharmaceutical assignment: Based on Ben’s lecture content delivered in week 9. The assignment is essentially a mechanism worksheet that gets you thinking about how to conjugate 19F to organic molecules to be used as radiotracers in PET imaging agents. The odd theory questions in the assignment are answered in the lectures. Ben doesn’t put these high yield concepts on his lecture slides so make sure you actually listen and take notes before coming into the optional drop-in session. This ran during your normal lab time in week 10, your TA will essentially hold your hand and give you most if not all the answers to the questions (of course you’ll have to write it up in your own words).
Final exam: 130 minutes for 120 marks, divided evenly between Lisa’s and Andrea’s lecture content (weeks 4-8, 10-12). Around 20 marks came from multiple choice questions (very easy), whereas the others come from short answers, including handwritten responses. Mock exams provided were suspiciously easy so I was bracing myself for a shocker after what happened with phys chem. When I opened the exam, I was very happy to find out that 90%+ of the questions were as easy as the mock exams, if not even easier.
Lisa’s section contained a few surprisingly difficult questions, but they’re not worth many marks and you can still do well on them using prior knowledge from biomed units.
Andrea’s section was exactly as advertised, she drops a lot of hints in her lectures on what will definitely come up on the exam. As the exam was rather easy, I don’t think they scaled it up by much, if at all.
Subject Code/Name: CHM3911 – Advanced Physical Chemistry
Workload:
1 hr pre-recorded lectures (usually 1.5 hr)
1 x 2 hr workshop
1 x 4 hr lab
Assessment:
30% labs
10% midsem
10% comp chem assignment
10% wiki assignment
40% final exam
Recorded Lectures: Yes, with screen capture
Past exams available: Yes (2013 and 2014), no solutions provided
Textbook Recommendation: Don’t remember and didn’t get
Lecturer(s):
Rico Tabor
Katya Pas
Alison Funston (unit coordinator)
Year & Semester of completion: 2023 Sem 1
Rating: 4 out of 5
Your Mark/Grade: 87 HD
Comments:
Overall impression and lecture content:
It goes without question that the hardest unit of any chem major is a phys chem one. CHM3911 is a unit that demands respect due to the conceptual difficulty and its insane workload. Before I did this unit, I was warned by previous students of it that it will take more time than all their other units combined during the semester. This was partially accurate, since 3911 took up more time than 3930 and MTH1020 combined, with only 3941 coming close. Although the official prereq of 3911 is 2922, I think 2922 alone is nowhere near enough preparation for 3911. Personally linalg/complex analysis should have been made prereqs otherwise you can’t appreciate quantum chem to the fullest extent, but maybe doing that will cause enrolments to go down and the unit to be cancelled (there were only 39 people in the cohort this year which is low by chem units’ standards).
Rico has you for surface chem and colloids. This sub-branch of phys chem has never been taught to you in VCE or in previous phys chem units (1011/51 and 2922). What makes it particularly difficult isn’t the maths, it’s the vast amount of surface/colloidal chem jargon. However, Rico did a great job at explaining them. Surface chem boils down to increasing surface area = not energetically favourable as surface molecules. Once I had this Eureka moment, everything was smooth sailing in this lecture block. I would’ve preferred learning about colloids later on in the semester after thermodynamics because thermo serves as the basis behind surface chem.
Katya starts off with comp chem and these lectures are extremely scary. There’s a lot of multivariable calculus, linalg and complex analysis going on and my weak mathematical mind was overloaded within 1 minute of starting comp chem lectures (only did methods in year 12, plus MTH1020 which I was taking on the side). However, the assessments which I’ll detail below don’t use any of these maths and are very qualitative. You only need to interpret the models on a qualitative level i.e. comp chem methods and their assumptions in terms of how molecular orbitals are filled. Her lectures continued with thermodynamics which was extremely interesting and useful for my other chem units since they conferred me this thermodynamic/energetic intuition that I didn’t have in previous units since this aspect was omitted for the sake of simplicity. Again, the thermodynamics lectures had calculus in them, deriving stuff like equilibrium constant and the partition function/Boltzmann distribution from first principles. None of this was examinable, only simple algebraic derivations of enthalpy/entropy were. Towards the end of Katya’s lectures, she talks a little about the Arrhenius equation and the interconnectivity between thermodynamics and kinetics. This is crucial to understand for any future chem teachers, so I’d highly recommend 3911 to any future chem teachers because by the end of it, you’ll gain a very deep and integrated understanding of the chem behind U3 and hence be able to teach it intuitively. Katya uses many effective analogies when explaining very abstract thermo content that I shall steal for when I become a chem teacher in around 2 year’s time.
Alison has you for the last month of the semester for kinetics and phase equilibrium. While her explanations are clear 99%+ of the time, her lectures are in this weird format where a single 50 min lecture is split into 5 very short videos. It really disrupts the flow of info when a video ends and you have to open the next one. She said in a workshop that she did this on purpose because people’s attention spans have shortened courtesy of Tiktok. Content-wise, kinetics can be challenging for those with mathematical skill issue eg myself. You won’t be doing much real calculus since you’ll just be equating the differential equations you come up with to different quantities/expressions depending on the assumption you’re using. Enzyme kinetics from biomed units make a comeback which made the lecture block slightly easier. Phase equilibrium is another concept that wasn’t covered well in 1st year chem, but the way Alison explained it made it very easy to understand. Lots of graph reading and interpretation in this section as opposed to memorising theory.
Midsem: 50 minutes for 45 marks, iirc 10 marks came from MCQs of different weighting and 35 marks came from 5 extended calculation questions where you have to answer on paper. The actual exam was easier than the practice questions Rico supplied you and didn’t examine much of the harder, more theoretical aspects of his lectures. However, the questions were of a different style to these practice questions. Many questions are just fancy geometry worded problems with a colloids background. Others are very plug and chuggable from the provided formula sheet, the only things you have to watch out for are the units. Colloidal/surface chem doesn’t like using SI units for its quantities, it likes units like mN/m or mJ/m2 for surface tension. Since relevant densities are given to you in SI units, I’d recommend converting everything into SI units so that you can use dimensional analysis. Scientific notation in calculations really come in clutch when you want to keep track of the units.
Lab: The lab program only ran in 9 out of 12 weeks and each lab is weighed by the number of weeks it lasted. The 3 wet labs last 2 weeks each, whereas comp chem ones only last one. For most labs there was a prelab quiz worth 5% of that particular lab. A little about each lab:
Surface tension: You investigate how surfactants affect surface tension measured using pendant drop tensiometry. Then in week 2, you have to design an experiment that compares the cost-effectiveness of two commercial detergents. To illustrate the insane workload of 3911, I never had to hand in anything late in 2 years of biomed but I had to hand in the surface tension report late because of the amount of jargon in surface chem literature. You have to learn 5 other pieces of jargon to define a jargon word and by the time you learned what the other jargon meant, you forgot why you were looking them up in the first place.
Kinetics: You use UV-Vis to monitor the kinetics of a photoactivated geometric isomerisation reaction. Then you have to use MATLAB to do some data fitting to calculate the rate constant from a version of the Arrhenius equation. In week 2, you’re asked to investigate the use of photosensitive dyes for banknote security features. My group decided to investigate how solvent polarity affects isomerisation rate because that’s the easiest experiment to do.
Colloids: You investigate the effects of pH and salt concentration (separately) on Fe(OH)3 colloidal stability. Then in week 2, you’re asked to design your own experiment to investigate how to destabilise a colloidal dispersion of bentonite in water. Hint: don’t do pH because it’s a massive pain as you have to constantly monitor it with a pH meter so that you don’t overshoot. Do salt and polymer concentration if you want to take things easy.
Comp chem labs: You go on a Zoom meeting where TAs walk you through answers to a Moodle quiz. You don’t actually use the supercomputers to calculate the values yourself, it has already been done for you and the output files are saved onto a location on the Monash server that you can access. I can describe these labs as Excel spam, because you’ll be using a spreadsheet to calculate different values all the time.
Comp chem assignment: This assignment has 6 topics on offer and you had to allocate yourself to one by a certain date, after which Katya will give you a random topic. To help you choose which topic to do, they have recorded short videos on each topic and what’s required in the report to score well. The assignment had a 1200 word limit, but this wasn’t enforced (I wrote 1900). Katya said “As long as you don’t write 20 pages I won’t count each word”.
Hint: do topic 4 (RAFT polymerisation) because although the introductory video makes it seem like it’s a lot of calculations and a lot of work, after you work through the Excel spam, interpretation of the data is super easy as literature is everywhere for this topic and the comp chem methods involved. I only had to compare 3 comp chem methods including the benchmark one, whereas I heard for other people’s topics they had to compare 24 because they had to investigate different methodologies combined with different basis sets. I was slightly hesitant to choose topic 4 at first because Katya did a post-doc thesis on it which means I’ll get caught out on inaccuracies in the report. However, she marked mine very leniently. Legit I got 100 on the report by following the video, she said it was the best comp chem assignment she has marked in over a decade. So take-home message, all you have to do is follow the darn video (excuse the GTA SA reference).
Wiki assignment: You’re randomly allocated a phys chem topic based on your lab group code and asked to do a group project on it. Your task is to create a wiki page on your allocated topic in the style of a Wikipedia article. There are 3 sections, introduction (500 word limit), physical derivation of the phenomenon (500 word limit) and problems + worked solutions (no word limit). The assignment was split into group and individual components, the introduction, physical derivations and referencing sections are assessed as a group and are worth 40% of the project. The problems and worked solutions section (worth 60% of the assignment) requires you to write 3 problems relevant to your assigned topic of increasing difficulty complete with worked solutions. The assignment is very easy to do well in if you use your time wisely and it was marked very leniently. However, there was some drama with the Moodle wiki page randomly deleting people’s images and replacing it with a blank box. Since I relied heavily on these to explain, it was kinda annoying to have to convert everything I wrote/drew into text. It was a common issue among the cohort so I emailed Rico a screenshot of how my wiki page was supposed to look like and that was an acceptable failsafe in case the wiki deletes my images again.
Final exam: 130 minutes for 120 marks, divided as follows: thermodynamics (60 marks), kinetics (32 marks) and phase equilibria (18 marks). THE. SINGLE. MOST. REVOLTING. EXAM. I’VE. SAT. Here’s a rough depiction of pretty much every question in the thermodynamics section:
Parts a and b: Something you’ve done before in the workshop problem sets, except on the difficult side
Part c (worth as much as parts a and b combined): SIKE something you’ve never seen before
The kinetics section wasn’t much better, pretty much all kinetics questions were harder than the ones on the problem set. Very error-prone and very time-consuming to do, expect to spend 1.5 min per mark on this section even though the time limit recommends a mark a minute.
The phase equilibrium questions were surprisingly easy. They were similar to the problem set questions you’re given and you can probably finish them in 10 minutes. Shame that this section was worth so little on the exam.
I’ll admit that a large part of the exam’s difficulty was attributable to my own skill issues. Since the green scientific calculator was clunky, I used Desmos on my phone for practice questions which was a big no-no since the actual scientific calculator requires you to enter all brackets otherwise it gives a syntax error, whereas Desmos does it for you automatically. In the end, I don’t think I got above 60%, but they scaled my exam to 91/120 (76%) after back-calculating from my final grade.
Subject Code/Name: SCI1000 - Scientific communication to influence change
Workload:
2 hr workshop
Assessment:
Popular media article (scientific communication competencies)
Infographic (scientific communication competencies)
Self review for popular media article and infographic
Peer reviews (x2 each) for popular media article and infographic
Resubmissions (if you didn’t get all competencies)
Recorded Lectures: No lectures, workshops are NOT recorded
Past exams available: No exam
Textbook Recommendation: None
Lecturer(s):
Bronwyn Isaacs (unit coordinator)
Year & Semester of completion: 2023 Sem 2
Rating: 0 out of 5
Your Mark/Grade: PGO
Comments:
Overall impression and lecture content: This unit is unnecessary and quite honestly a waste of $1000. I could’ve been doing fun calculus and linalg stuff in MTH1030 that prepare me for when I teach maths out of field (while saving $500), but I needed to do this useless unit to graduate. It supposedly teaches you scientific communication and how to peer review, but it’s just a follow-the-rubric subjective arts/writing unit that has been made compulsory for sci students.
Workshops are not compulsory to attend despite what they say, Bronwyn said those who don’t attend workshops will have trouble meeting competencies, but I don’t think that’s true at all. I only attended 2 workshops in the entire semester and I met all competencies without having to do the additional assessment. Apparently those missing competencies will be marked more leniently in the resubmissions, but I can’t confirm or deny that. I only went in two weeks where the workshop topic is relevant to the assessments (writing popular media articles in week 3 and designing infographics in week 7). In the end, they weren’t helpful either and I wished I slept in instead.
That being said, the unit is set to become even worse in the coming years, which is why I rated it 0/5 so that future cohorts can give it a rating with a negative number. There will apparently be an extra group assignment and workshop attendance will be associated with marks which makes them compulsory. Not to mention that they will change the unit such that the final grade is no longer pass/fail only like it is run now, there will be numerical marks associated as of 2024.
Popular media article: You have to write a popular media article similar to the ones you see on The Conversation around 700 words in length (strict limit). The idea is to base your popular media article on a recently published (within 6 months of the semester’s start) peer-reviewed scientific article.
There’s a very detailed rubric available on the Moodle page with all the competencies listed and a dotpoint list of stuff you need to include to meet each competency. Many rules are very pedantic and arbitrary like “at least 75% of your sentences must be shorter than 17 words”, or “usage of 1st, 2nd and 3rd person”. Others are quite vague, like “tells a balanced story on your chosen article”. Make sure you clarify on the forums what the more ambiguous dotpoints mean, as Bronwyn answers the forum questions promptly to her credit. The most annoying competency to meet is the referencing one. You had to use a referencing style invented by Bronwyn called Undergraduate Research in Scientific Practise and Communication (UR-SPC) that’s based on the CSIRO referencing style. She specifically made us use this so that we can’t use EndNote, which is very pointless because it’s such a powerful tool that would’ve made referencing so easy for first years. There’s a document with all the pedantic referencing rules to follow, as long as you follow them, you can get the referencing competency. You’re allowed up to 3 mistakes in the reference list so there’s some leeway.
As long as you follow the rubric, you should be fine in theory. In practice, I think your mark is heavily dependent on the easiness/harshness of your assessor and most assessors seem to be harsh when marking judging from my peers’ consensus. I went dotpoint by dotpoint when writing and proofreading my article on PFAS (forever chemicals), but I still ended up with 7/8 scientific communication competencies. I didn’t meet the language competency due to the alleged presence of typos (that neither Word, myself nor Grammarly which is a spellchecker suggested by the teaching team) could identify. I went into a workshop for some detailed feedback (you’re not given any comments, only a competency table). It was futile as I didn’t get any feedback on where the typos are located. Some people missing other competencies have told of a similar experience when seeking feedback.
Infographic: Similar story with the popular media article, except the competencies have different dotpoints associated with them as infographics are visual communication pieces. Again, follow the rubric dotpoint by dotpoint and you should be fine.
If you missed one or more scientific communication competencies in the popular media article like I did, the infographic is your chance to get the missing competency(ies) back. The visual elements competency is harder to get in the infographic as there are more things that can go wrong in terms of visuals, whereas the language competency is easier as the infographic has less words.
Since infographics are centred on conciseness, I decided to do mine on why eating vegetables is good for you. Talking about forever chemicals would’ve been too convoluted. Part of my decision to change my topic is that I was doing a food chem group project on pigment chemicals in different fruits and vegetables (many of which have nutritional benefits). It would’ve been a shame for the research I did to go to waste, especially given that I’m allowed to reuse it because the food chem poster cannot contain information on health benefits. In the end, they awarded me 8/8 competencies for an infographic I made in 2-3 hours. They’re definitely more lenient when marking the infographic compared to the popular media article.
Self and peer review: You have to write self reviews for each of your assignments after you submit each of them. They need to be complete, specific and actionable. What this means is that the review must address all dotpoints in each competency (complete), you have to provide examples of why you met or haven’t met the competency (specific) and if you rate yourself “not yet competent”, you have to state ways you can improve your assignment to achieve it in a resubmission.
Same idea with the peer reviews, where you have to review 2 randomly allocated articles and 2 randomly allocated infographics. Your comments also have to be complete, specific and actionable (if you give a “not yet competent” rating).
The self and peer reviews are marked quite leniently as you’re allowed up to 4 improperly reviewed (incomplete, not specific enough or no improvements suggested) competencies for each review you do before you receive a “not yet competent”. They know some competencies are more subjective than others, so if your rating disagrees with the marks given by an assessor, they won’t take marks off as long as you justify everything by being complete, specific and actionable.
Subject Code/Name: CHM2962 – Food chemistry
Workload:
1 x 2 hr workshop
1 x 4 hr lab
Assessment:
30% labs (including the poster assignment)
15% midsem
20% weekly quizzes
35% final exam
Recorded Lectures: Yes, with screen capture
Past exams available: No, mock exam provided for the final exam only
Textbook Recommendation: Coultate, Food the Chemistry of its Components 6th edition (available online on Moodle, really useful for the weekly quizzes)
Lecturer(s):
Drasko Vidovic (unit coordinator)
Perran Cook
Minoli Aponso
Year & Semester of completion: 2023 Sem 2
Rating: 3 out of 5
Your Mark/Grade: 96 HD
Comments:
Overall impression and lecture content: The weekly 2 hr workshops are divided into an 1 hour lecture and 1 hour lectorial where you solve questions on a problem set (not assessed).
Drasko has you for the first 3 weeks and his lectures cover carbohydrates, lipids and proteins. Essentially VCE food chem 2.0: electric boogaloo, but with some added content like the delta notation for unsaturated fatty acid nomenclature, Maillard Reaction between reducing sugars and proteins (those taking CHM3922 will recognise this as a trivial imine formation mechanism), as well as surfactant activities of these macromolecules during cooking. Just like in CHM3941, Drasko sometimes gets things wrong in terms of carbohydrate anomer nomenclature, but you won’t be penalised if you write the technically correct answer that is different from his. While his lectures won’t be explicitly examinable on the final exam as it doesn’t examine weeks 1-3 content, I’d recommend retaining the knowledge from his lectures as they’re fundamental for the physical functionalities and colloids stuff covered by Perran and Minoli.
Perran has you for weeks 4-8, except for week 5 since the midsem replaces the lecture. He covers vitamins + minerals, food colours + flavours, additives, contaminants as well as what’s known as physical functionalities. A lot of it will be new to you and most of Perran’s section is rote learning. You have to learn the chemical classes of pesticides and how they’re used/selected safely, as well as the formal names of each vitamin covered in detail. Thankfully you won’t have to memorise the E number tables as he said it will be supplied if needed in assessments. Physical functionality of ingredients is all about how they give food its texture. This is where interfacial colloidal chem from CHM3911 really saved me, because a lot of it is to do with how food macromolecules have amphipathic properties and can therefore act as surfactants to stabilise/form emulsions. Last thing I’d like to say is that if Perran starts drawing something on the whiteboard, you’d better listen in very closely because these concepts will be especially examinable.
Minoli has you for the last 4 weeks, covering emulsions, water in food and case studies of random foods and drinks. Again, taking CHM3911 will carry you for emulsions and interpreting the phase diagrams in the water weeks. The case studies were quite random and annoying since it’s all rote learning random nutritional facts about the most common foods we eat. Lots of overlaps with Perrans’ lectures in those weeks in terms of micronutrients and physical functionality.
Midsem: 50 minutes for 45 marks on week 1-3 content (carbs, lipids and proteins). A mix of multiple choice and short answer questions. While examinable content could be very detailed in theory (as all eBook content is technically examinable), the actual midsem was very easy compared to the weekly quizzes probably because it’s closed book. Drasko confirmed to me when I asked that you don’t have to memorise the different specific protein content tables or trivial names for fatty acids/sugars. No mock midsems were provided, but if you can answer the workshop questions in Drasko’s lectures, you’ll be more than prepared because they’re harder than your midsem. I felt that they're not pedantic with marking the short questions at all, even though it's hard to guess what to write for them to get all the marks.
Lab: The lab course is marked out of 160 and is divided as follows. Full write-up required for all labs except for the poster. A really neat thing about labs in this unit is that they’re not due after 1 week like most chem units, you get 1.5-3 weeks to do them depending on the weighting.
Lab 1 (Maillard reaction), 25 marks: You investigate the effects of 3 independent variables of your choice on the rate of Maillard reaction using UV-Visible spectroscopy.
Lab 2 (Detecting syrup adulteration of honey), 25 marks: You test for HMF in honey and determine whether or not its concentration indicates adulteration by syrup, again using UV-Visible spectroscopy with background correction by sodium bisulfite.
Lab 3 (Protein assay), 25 marks: You compare and contrast the effectiveness (in terms of accuracy and precision) of the BCA, Bradford and Folin-Lowry protein assays. Even more Beer-Lambert Law and UV-Vis, by this point in the lab program, you’re totally drunk (pun intended). Pretty easy to full mark if you did CHM2922 because it’s a rehash of all the quantitative parameters for evaluating accuracy and precision i.e. %relative error and %relative standard deviation respectively.
Lab 4 (Lipid analysis), 35 marks: You analyse the fats present in a cooking oil and from pooled class data, choose the most effective analytical method out of Wij’s titration, IR spectroscopy and gas chromatography for determining the fat content. The last 10 marks come from an oral examination where you get asked individually questions on the theory behind the analytical techniques. Having knowledge from CHM2922 or a careful read through of the lab manual should be more than enough.
Poster, 25 marks: You have to do a poster based on a very broad food chem topic and you’ll present a 7 min oral presentation (with 3 min question time) using it as your only slide. This is a group project done in groups of 4. While the rubric is vague, you’re assessed rather leniently on it, although the questions the TAs pose to you during question time were really difficult. Some comments are contradictory, one TA thought our title was cringe (“With flying colours”), another said it was great. You also can’t talk about anything that occurs after the food has entered your body i.e. nutritional benefits etc. The poster is worth 15 marks, whereas the peer review is 1 mark for participation and 9 marks for your average score that your group members give you.
My group chose the origins of colour in fruits and vegetables as our topic because I’ve taken all phys chem units offered (CHM2922 + CHM3911) and am able to explain it in terms of conjugation. You get around 3 weeks to work on the poster, including the midsem break, and you don’t have labs during these weeks to help you manage your time.
Lab 5 (Group project), 25 marks: You’re asked to determine the fat and protein content of Parmesan cheese (using GC and Bradford assay respectively) and from the data, determine whether or not it has been adulterated. Lots of technical difficulties happened because the pH meter was not behaving, so be prepared to stay the entire session. Communicate well with other groups when sharing data as well, since it is a pain when you promised to exchange data in the lab only to find out you have no means to contact the other group. Since this is a group report, it’s essentially 2 lab reports combined into 1, but if you coordinate well, it’s not stressful at all.
Weekly quizzes: There’s a quiz you have to complete every week covering concepts delivered in the workshop for that week, except for week 5 as that’s when the midsem occurs. It opens on Friday afternoons after your workshop and closes on Wednesday 5pm the following week. It’s open book, but there’s a time limit of 1 hour once you click the “start” button. They’re generally easy marks, however some questions have incorrect solutions and most quizzes have questions from the optional readings (mostly from the prescribed textbook that they give you access to) when they’re explicitly not examinable. In the end, they chose the best 10 out of your 11 quizzes, then they offered you 2 bonus marks on top of this.
Final exam: 130 minutes for 120 marks examining lecture content from week 4 and weeks 6-12. Just like the midsem, in theory all nitty gritty details in the eBooks were technically examinable. The volume of these across the 8 examinable weeks was so overwhelming that I asked Perran and Minoli before the exam about the examinability of specific facts. They told me the specific nutrient values won’t be examinable and if it’s going to be asked in a question, they’ll give you the eBook tables in the stem. All you have to know is qualitatively which foods are rich in which nutrients. You don’t even need to know specific pesticide names, nor do you need to know how to draw them, only recognising its class from its structure is examined.
They provide a mock exam, it does have one question that examined optional reading content. Other than that the mock is very good preparation since it’s slightly harder than the actual exam, which didn’t go into details and ended up being extremely easy. I suspect that's why the final exam was likely scaled down from my back-calculated exam score, it's the only chem unit I've taken that scales down the final exam. Either that, or they decided to mark short answer questions more strictly after being too lenient on the midsem. They kept their promise of not including optional reading content in the actual exam, Perran told us he checked many times in the revision lecture that this won't happen.
