EXPERIMENTATION
“Make sure you know sig figs and how to calculate error.”
Do this and you might have a chance at passing
It’s so obvious that this photo is AI but if you can tell me what safety rules these students aren’t following, bonus points for you
OVERVIEW
APSC 102 is the class that contains almost all of your labs. It generally includes physics and chemistry labs. It’s a course that teaches you how to use quantitative experimental design in various fields and settings. Last year, my favourite lab was working with polymers, but we also got to work with titration, arduinos, circuits, and lots of other tools.
I find many students tend to like this class because there isn’t much work to be done outside of class other than the pre-labs. Almost all of our assignments were completed within a 3-hour time frame, and I found they were usually marked pretty generously. I also appreciated the help from TAs; when you asked them questions, they were patient with you and more than willing to help out.
There isn’t much to touch on for this class as it is worth the least GPA (grade point average) credits of any first semester class (classes are weighted differently when your GPA is calculated). I will do my best to give you some tips, tricks, and advice to help you succeed.
While they can be extremely frustrating in the moment (once I needed 9 attempts to pass the pre-lab), these are extremely important to get right. You may be inclined to rush them and skim over the content very quickly, but I promise you that taking your time (1-2 hours depending on the lab) to make sure you’ve got all the information correct will ensure you get a good grade on the quiz on your first try.
If you’re worried about a certain lab because your high school teacher didn’t fully prepare you (for me it was chem), the pre-lab can help you feel more prepared.
PRE-LABS
MIDTERM
The midterm for this class was honestly one of the worst of first semester. Each question is worth A LOT, so if when I got one wrong, it felt like my grade went down by 20% (I’m not sure if this is accurate but it felt like it).
Just don’t worry about doing badly on the midterm, it’s not that hard to recover and you can still finish the class with a very good grade.
Review error propagation, partial derivatives, safety procedures, and anything else the course instructor heavily emphasizes.
Take your time on each question and make sure you’re going over your calculations at least once before submitting. Check your negative signs because that’s usually where you get tricked and you won’t be able to get any points for a question like that, in my opinion.
For our year, we had the chance to select which lab we wanted to do as our “final project”. When choosing your final lab, remember that all options are fairly similar in difficulty. My advice is to choose a lab that genuinely interests you, rather than trying to pick what seems like the easiest option.
Taking time on writing the report and getting the formatting correct is where I found the marks mattered the most, not so much the actual experiment.