Productivity

Saved By The Bell In Organic Chemistry

The Spring 2008 semester ended dramatically for me today. I was about an hour into my Organic Chemistry final when the fire alarm went off. My professor had us leave our exam, take our stuff and leave the room. It was pretty obvious that she didn’t have a backup plan for something like this. I don’t know that I would either if I were a professor.

After about 15 minutes, the alarm was still going off. (Kind of suspicious too…I overheard a fellow student saying that the same thing happened during the previous class this morning. Either some students are scheming, or there is a serious malfunction with the fire alarm.)

We were told to go ahead and go home. Since we were all together, there was no way to prevent people from talking and sharing answers, so it wouldn’t be fair to let us continue taking the exam. She said that she would collect all the tests and figure out a way to grade them that would be fair.

I got about 1/2 completed with still an hour left when the alarm went off. We’ll see how it turns out.

One thing is for sure - if anyone out there is currently taking or going to take Organic Chemistry - go download the desktop version of Marvin Sketch. It’s an incredibly useful software package that lets you draw molecules in 2D or 3D. There are tools to see stereochemistry, radicals, and S/R chirality. You can also have the IUPAC name of a molecule displayed after you’ve drawn it. I wrote about this program back at the beginning of the semester, and can now say that I don’t know what I would have done without it.