Rachel Austin

Homework is on the Achieve platform, which you have to pay for. Do NOT pay for the textbook — she never uses it, and you can easily find it free online. For the midterms, they actually did a good job posting a clear list of everything that would be tested. You should rely on external websites and YouTube to learn the material; if you do that, you’ll do very well on the exams. There are three midterms, the lowest one is dropped, and there is a final.

4 exams, lowest one dropped, 1 final, worksheets in class collected at random, weekly check-ins

I'm sitting here for the final and I have no idea what she wants. At this point it's probably not even my fault. Her enthusiastic demeanor, while adorable, is a huge slap to the face.

I went into this class expecting to build on what I learned in AP Chem, but it ended up being a huge disappointment. The course was terribly organized and taught using crappy lecture slides that sometimes even had incorrect information. Lectures were basically useless. Professor Austin seems like a nice person, but she is a terrible teacher and should not be teaching general chemistry. She consistently made simple, introductory topics way more confusing than they needed to be by using convoluted, nonsensical analogies. I stopped going to lecture because it honestly made the material harder to understand, not easier. It was painful to watch people get confused over topics that were actually not hard at all. If you took AP Chem, this class will be a complete joke. Overall, it felt like a massive waste of time and easily the most useless lecture I’ve sat through.

This class made me extremely confused. I found myself having to teach myself all the lectures before each exam. Austin does not do a good job at connecting and conveying all the content. Typically the practice exams posted were much easier than our actual exam. She expects us to have a strong foundation in general chemistry.

Coming from a person this finals season, do not (I repeat: do not) if you value your nerves and sanity, take this class. The workload is not reasonable for an "intro" class of its worth. It eats up your time so 1) you can't spend time on classes you actually enjoy and 2) you don't even understand it despite all the time you spend on it I tried learning this whole semester and my mind is honestly drawing a blank right now. If anything, my knowledge is negative. This is actually a weed-out class disguised in the form of "we want to help you all learn regardless of your level! !!! *smiley face*") Bare minimum on topic is taught in lecture. Oftentimes precious time is wasted. (Basically I agree with the previous reviewer that the course organization could use some improvement)

8% in-class worksheets (were only collected some classes) 12% homework (only one problem set per week, pretty easy overall) 28% in-class exams (you take three exams, but only the higher two of your exam grades are counted for 14% each) 32% lab (this is where a vast majority of your time will be spent, especially when you start writing lab reports) 20% final exam (if you score higher on this final than one of your midterms, it will replace that midterm grade)

The content really wasn't too bad—you can drop a midterm and sub in your final for another midterm, so there's a lot of flexibility. Didn't spend too much time on this class aside from exam weeks.

see above for detailed description. HIGH workload. 1 lab report per week, 1 online Sapling homework per week (3-5 hrs each) 4 exams, 2 can drop. add at least 10 hours of studying per week to do well

Going into this course, I did not expect it to be too difficult, as I had already taken a year of honors chemistry and AP chemistry in high school. I was correct, but I didn’t realize JUST how reliant on my AP chemistry knowledge I would be in this course. While Professor Austin was sweet and seemed to mean well, her lectures oftentimes just left me more confused than before. I would either come to class and tune the lectures out just so I could get my in-class worksheet credit, OR I would skip class entirely and just take my chances that my in-class worksheet would not be collected (they only take up your worksheet some classes). I learned much better from just looking at the uploaded slides and watching youtube videos than from any of Professor Austin’s lectures. I was able to get As on all the midterms after a decent amount of studying, but I know so many people who were struggling to even pass the class because of Professor Austin’s (and the other Gen Chem Professors’) inability to teach clearly. I also felt as though the course was pretty inorganized in terms of content. While there is an online textbook, the lectures do not contain any chapter numbers, and the order of everything feels pretty random. The lab portion was a whole different experience. There was a pretty decent learning curve at the beginning regarding lab procedures, lab notebook stuff, and the post lab as…