Physical Chemistry I C3079

COME TO CLASS!!!

And copy everything down from the board and you'll be fine for the homework and tests. You're not tested on anything that she didn't write on the board, and you need to know what was covered in class in order to know what to ignore from the book. Sure, it meets three days a week, but Friday's just a 50 minute lecture which you could probably show up to hungover and be fine as long as you're capable of copying everything off the board.

Class is supposed to be curved around a high B, with one standard deviation equaling a full grade difference (both above and below).

Overall, she's a good professor- it's easy to stay awake in lectures, and she specifies everything that will be covered on each test. And all the notes are on the board. The absolute most important thing is to come to class and copy everything down.

Kaufman is very organized. She lectures at a very reasonable pace and uses chalk on blackboard. Kaufman uses extensive notes during her lectures, which can be good because her notes tend to give you a better idea of what she wanted you to know (v. the textbook), but were also bad sometimes because she would just copy her notes directly and not really think about what she's writing. This led occasionally to situations where a student would ask a question with a fairly obvious answer, but she wouldn't be able to answer because she wasn't really paying attention to what she was writing. Having said that, most of the time she was pretty good with questions.

Outside of class she is very approachable, very personable, and very willing to answer questions. Take advantage of this!
The textbook by Levine is good but not great. I'm not sure why we didn't use the standard physical chemistry book by Atkins. Levine is very readable and comes with a solutions manual. Sometimes homework questions would be taken directly from the textbook.