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NUS Life Science Module Review: CM1401 Chemistry for Life Sciences

Lecturers: Dr. Linda for physical, Fung Fun Man for organic

Concepts are kinda difficult to grasp, and the pacing of lectures are super fast. But the questions that come out usually aren’t as difficult as what you would expect. A good grasp of A level chemistry will help, although not by much. I had an A in A level H2 Chem but found the physical chem part super confusing anyway. Plus Dr. Linda kinda rushes through a lot of the examples so you have to go figure out what you were copying down after the lecture. Organic is more familiar at least at the start with alkanes alkenes etc but it gets worse and the number of reactions is ridiculous. Fun Man is a very good lecturer even though we don’t get to see him much in person as the content lectures are all short multimedia webcasts.

GO FOR TUTORIALS. I made a bad decision with my timetable and put my tutorial at 9am so even though I had good tutors for both my physical and organic I can count the number of times I went for tutorial on one hand. Very big regret here because my friends who went all found the concepts a lot clearer after explanations from my tutors.

For finals I thought I would be able to memorise the organic reactions the day before but I was so wrong. Cost me more than 10/20 marks for the organic structured question which if you had memorised, would be a free 20 marks.

But a lot of people tend to give up on this module so if you work hard/smart for it the bell curve will generally help you since a lot of people plan to s/u it from the start.

Expected grade: B+/A-

Actual: A-

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