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Chemistry |
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South
Region E-mail list: proffee@aol.com, khess@cypresscollege.edu, vvalverde@cypresscollege.edu,
jthomas@swc.cc.ca.us, jim.fisher@imperial.edu, dcarranza@ivc.edu,
terrygleason@earthlink.net, dabma@ccsf.cc.ca.us, hls@cchem.berkeley.edu,
vsteger@san.rr.com, "Bill Fink" <whfink@ucdavis.edu>,
sdavid@imperial.cc.ca.us, jstewart@elcamino.edu The notes from the Northern Regional Meeting (Oakland Oct 26, 2002) were discussed. Many of the same topics are of concern to the Southern group as well. CAN Descriptors. There was general agreement with the idea that the ACS course outlines and "Guides" and the ACS exams be used to indicate curricula and the appropriate level of the courses. The most difficult of the courses to define is Organic Chemistry. There are problems with the State Colleges and the University accepting courses from the Community Colleges. There are two sets of problems. The first is the specification of arbitrary requirements. The example given at the Northern meeting was the specification of access to an NMR machine. Many more examples emerged in this meeting, including the requirement that the topics be taught in essentially the same order as in the accepting school. The second set of criteria involved the nominal expertise of the instructors - requiring that an acceptable course be taught by an instructor with a PhD, for example, with an MS degree not acceptable. It was noted at both Regional Meetings that the University tends to be more flexible than some of the State Colleges in accepting Chemistry credits from the Community Colleges. Using the ACS Examinations as criteria would change the emphasis from the organization of the various courses to an emphasis on the skill of the students who have completed the courses. Laboratory: Requirements for the laboratory were discussed and the point was made that the course should require a notebook with write-ups of the experiments. The question of requirements for Nursing majors was discussed. It was agreed that if the requirement for the Nurses was only one semester of Chemistry, it should be the Organic Chem, BioChem semester. The ACS has a number of exams that can serve as placement exams for the first college chemistry course and also as waiver out of one or more terms of General Chemistry. In a meeting with the Engineering group, there was discussion of the SCIGETC and of the Transfer AA degree. Because of the requirement that Science courses be taken in sequence, it is difficult to specify a set of courses that could be completed in the time available as a lower division student and still be satisfactory for most technical majors. The Transfer AA degree seems less a matter for the individual subject matter groups than for the Community College Administrations. In a meeting with the Biology group, the Chemistry requirements for Biology courses were discussed. A possible starting point is the new National Academy of Sciences Report: Biology 2010. This is available at http://www.nap.edu/books/0309085357/html/
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