So I'm wondering if the orgo courses are as hard as everyone makes them out to be. I did pretty well in Chem 1A03 and 1AA3 and I heard from a few people that if you're good at chemistry and you like it, orgo won't be too bad, but I've also heard from others that orgo will be bad no matter what you do.

Right now I'm debating between taking both of them in my second year or taking the first one during the school year and the second one over the summer or taking both in my third year.

Any thoughts?

you mean chem 20A3 and chem 20B3 right ?

ive heard the same rumors, the way i look at it is that if your going to have to take them anyways just do them without thinking of what others said cus thats just going to make it more intimidating. also i would advise against taking 1 during the year and the other over the summer because ur going to have that 6 month gap b/w the two which is a nono ( cus if your anything like me ull forget quite a bit by that time)

and i think finsihing orgo in second year would be best, but it depends on ur faculty and the courses u polna to take in 2nd and 3rd year. some faculties recomend completing them by the nend of 2nd, others have no op. also if ur in a program like mine, which has a killer 3rd year, finishing orgo in 2nd would be best, but then again if ur 2nd year is killer and 3rd not so much then y not wait till 3rd to do it.

Nah man I wouldnt say its insanely hard. The workload is quite a bit, though Ill admit. Im taking it over the summer and I can tell you that it takes a lot of practice to get some of these things thru your head.

Its kind of like a math course in that it requires lots of practice, but its a very different discipline. Youre gonna work with 3d structures (which stumps many), curly arrows, and lots of background theory. Some of the problems that you do for this course can take quite a bit of time.

All in all, id say that this can be a difficult course, but only because it requires so much practice. Honestly, I have taken physics 1b03 in my first term last year with a 6 course workload. I can tell you that it did not require as much practice as orgo only because much of the physics that I was doing then I was familiar with since high school.
Orgo is a totally different discipline; its not something you could have practiced since high school.

Other than that its actually a pretty cool course. If chem is your thing, youll like it

Good idea starting this thread, best to get some opinions.

Well I'm transferring to Health Sciences in my second year and from what I hear, that's the hardest year in the program. One person told me that the anatomy course + the orgo course will be a hell of a workload so that's why I'm wondering. I'm taking both orgos because I know American med schools require it

Another question that hopefully someone can answer:

Does 2OA3/2OB3 require a lot of knowledge from 1A03/1AA3?

Originally Posted by RememberTwce

Another question that hopefully someone can answer:

Does 2OA3/2OB3 require a lot of knowledge from 1A03/1AA3?

So far (for 2OA3), not much at all. The only stuff you'll probably need to know is nomenclature and a few other things that are deemed as "prior knowledge", but other than that, the Orgo chapter we did in 1AA3 seems to be pretty irrelevant because it was just so basic.

Orgo is a bird course....enough said!!

I did better in chem 2OA3 compared to chem 1a03.

Ugh, I miss Chem 1AA3's orgo chapters. Everything is so much simpler in that course.

Just make sure you do a ton of practice problems. In first year chem you might have been able to get away with only doing some practice and focusing mostly on the notes (like me >.>), but doing that in 2OA3 probably wouldn't be a smart idea. Besides that, it's really not that bad. There are a lot of new concepts and mechanisms you have to understand, though, so make sure you give yourself enough time to soak it all in and fully understand it.

Originally Posted by karna

I did better in chem 2OA3 compared to chem 1a03.

Lol so are you saying that 2OA3 was easier than 1A03? Or did you put more time and effort into orgo (not saying you didn't put time into 1A03 of course!)?

I'm taking Orgo in the summer, not at Mac though but at York, assuming the content is the same, I'm finding the course content to be easy, the labs to be easy, but the tests contain very difficult application questions based on the very simple course content. It's very easy to disillusion yourself thinking "you've got this" but 80% to 90% of the time in course, you haven't. With that said, over the summer, for McMaster, the average for the first midterm was 72% and the average for the first orgo midterm at York was 46%, so the courses are likely from two different worlds. If I remember, Chem 1AA3 had very similar midterm averages, so its not hard to imagine that the two courses are similar, but the sample size for orgo is much smaller, and usually sampled from the kids who did well in first year chem.

There is some content overlap with 1AA3, like, you'll already know all the functional groups, and be very familiar with most of the naming (not all of it), you already know about SN1 AND SN2 and also some basic stereochemistry (E,Z,Chair,Boat). Orgo for me thus far has been a massive amount of reactions I hadn't been exposed to before, a lot of new sterochemistry issues to worry about (chirality, R,S), some new naming conventions in the form of bicyclic compounds. The application questions that are difficult are structured in a way that I haven't seen before. You're given a start, and an end point? easy? Not really. first of all, there are about 30 to 40 reactions you have memorized up to this point, then you need to know which reactions the conditions favour, often its more than one, and you'll need to worry about most of the minor products, if the professor requires you to write the mechanism, then you'll also need to worry about electron flow. You'll also need to worry about resonance and how they can affect major and minor structures. I think you see where I'm going with this.

Personal Opinion: Doable? Yes. Easy? No. I was talking to another transfer girl trying to talk her out of taking orgo. if 2nd year health science is really hard enough, you have 2 electives, try to chill in them. Orgo needs work, I'm finding this to be true even though i'm summering it. I also slack off considerably in the summer though, it's hard not too with such great weather, being at home, old friends, macinsiders, all this "OMG SECOND YEAR" drama, and the various other perks/events lol

Originally Posted by Bernard

Lol so are you saying that 2OA3 was easier than 1A03? Or did you put more time and effort into orgo (not saying you didn't put time into 1A03 of course!)?

I think I spent equal time studying for both, but I found orgo more interesting than enthalpy and entrophy stuff.

Honestly, 1a03/1aa3 is not reflective of whether or not you'll do well in orgo.
nobody drops out of first year chem.. a lot of people do in orgo.
if you study your ass off, you'll probably pull off a decent mark
once you fall behind, you'll get screwed. if you cram orgo, you're done. it's not like 1a03/1aa3 that you can cram the crap out of in the night before and ace the exam.
don't expect a high mark without putting in the equivalent amount of work.

The reason I don't want to take orgo in third year is because of the one year gap it would cause between 1A03/1AA3 and the orgos. But from people who have taken orgo or are currently taking orgo, do you think the one year gap would make much of a difference? Is the overlap between 1AA3 and orgo so small that forgetting most of what I learned in 1AA3 would be insignificant?