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Hello,
I would be grateful to hear from college programs that teach less than one full year of General Chemistry. At present, we teach 3 quarters of General Chemistry (Zumdahl and Zumdahl), a one quarter Fundamental Inorganic Chemistry (Rayner-Canham and Overton) and a one quarter Advanced Inorganic Chemistry (Shriver and Atkins).
We are exploring the possibility of shortening our general chemistry sequence to 2 quarters and then combining the topics usually covered in the third quarter into Fundamental Inorganic Chemistry course and other courses.
Does anyone have a recommendation for topics to cover in a 2 quarter (or 1 semester) General chemistry course?
Thanks,
Eric
We recently moved to follow ACS accreditation, with a one-semester General Chemistry course. We couldn't make do with just that for pre-med students, so we created two tracks after that point. Pre-med, non-chem majors take a second semester of General Chem, then move on to a one-semester Foundations of Organic Chemistry. The majors in our dept (Chem, Biochem, and Forensic Sci), are required to complete the full Foundations sequence: Inorganic, Analytical, Organic, Physical and Biochem, and an advanced analytical - Instrumental Analysis. We had to play with the one-semester G Chem topics list to make sure students would be prepared: Intro, Atoms/isotopes/nomenclature, metathesis reactions, simple redox reactions, limiting agent/percent composition, thermochemistry, electronic structure of atoms/orbitals/electron configurations/IE/EA/radii, LDS/VSEPR/simple MO theory, Gas Laws, Kinetics, simple equilibria. The other typical G Chem topics are incorporated into the Foundations classes.
Dear Eric,
At Hamilton we have only one track for all students (science majors, premeds, neuorscience, biology, etc.) and we have a "sandwich" curriculum. In our one-semester introductory course taught in the fall semester, we cover atomic/molecular structure and bonding, properties of gases/solutions including intermolecular forces and types of reactions and stocihiometry, thermochemistry and thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, and equilibrium including acid-base. After that course, most students next enroll in Organic I and II (so we don't ever cover the organic chapter in Intro). They finish the four semester sequence by taking an intermediate-level (pre-pchem) course in biochemistry or inorganic. I can't speak for the topics covered in the biochemistry course, but in my inorganic and materials chemistry course I pick up (at a slightly higher level) the topics we left out of Intro: nuclear chemistry, more detailed properties of the elements and perioidic trends, transition metal coordination chemistry, solid-state structure, and electrochemistry all withing the context of descriptive chemistry of the elements and inorganic materials chemistry.
For Intro we use Gilbert (WWNorton) and for my Inorganic course I have used Rodgers but am switching this next spring to Rayner-Canham.
Maybe our split in topics will help you.
Karen