November 29, 2007

Chemistry Results

Got my chem test back!



I PASSED! Alright prefrosh, take note, at MIT on a test, it is possible to be happy about a 59%.

Some fun things to note on my grades:

1) Question 1 and Question 3? Complete losses, but hilarious! 3/17 is just SO INCORRECT! Like, I think they gave me points because they felt bad for me.
2) Question 6? DOMINATED! This is funny, because the equation I remembered for that question had a bunch of variables in it and I forgot what all of them stood for. I spent about 10 minutes on that question switching numbers around, musical variables if you will, until I ended up with a number that was either non-negative or non-imaginary. Eventually I came up with something and went with it. It was right!
3) 4% of question 3 was over a topic that was never ever ever talked about in the book or lecture or anywhere. My recitation instructor wasn't happy about it, nor are we. Instant failure on 4% of the test. w00t!

So that's 3.091, I'll give you an update on class averages shortly (tomorrowish).

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

See the funny thing about that 4% that was instant failure was that I missed it because I was gonna come back to that part of the question but then ran out of time and left it blank. And my recitation complained about how you approximate #1 to get the right answer and my TA admitted they didn't know what kind of solution they'd post to that or #3.

Sam said...

Pass, yay! Riddle me this: 3.091 vs. 5.112?

Compare and contrast? Venn diagrams? I guess that's unnecessary, but I have no idea... I'm just wondering what the main differences are.

Mmm, I'm a prefrosh.

Karen said...

I'm glad to be in high school with my six hours a week of class for 30-odd weeks to cover your one semester of topics, where I can easily score at least a 90% on every test and we get a formula sheet :) College will be quite the shock, I suppose.

Anonymous said...

@sam

It's not really reasonable to compare 3.091 to 5.112, a more useful comparison would be 3.091 to 5.111. 3.091 is solid-state and has more to do with structure, crystals, and atomic stuff. 5.111 is more about solutions, acids, bases, and other "squishy" stuff.

5.112 is the REALLY hard version of 5.111.

Paul said...

Snively has it right. 5.112 is only worth it if you had an extremely strong chemistry background in high school (two years as a general rule, including an AP course). I'm taking 5.112 right now - much of what we study is familiar to me (electrochemistry, acid-base reactions, sigma/pi bonds, etc.) but, as you can expect, the professors go much more in depth than any high school teacher can.

The MIT blogs have much more information on the various freshman classes, as well as courses for upperclassmen, so definitely check those out as well. ;)