CHEMISTRY OF NATURAL & ENGINEERING SYSTEMS

“Engineering is hard and I hope you aren’t too hard on yourself.”

OVERVIEW

This course is a great follow-up to APSC 132 ( Chemistry of Engineering Materials), diving deeper into the chemistry concepts such as acids and bases, electrochemistry, reaction kinetics, and chemical equilibrium. The course will also discuss the environmental issues related to each topic during lectures, and put a heavy emphasis of applications for these concepts.

You'll have three lectures and one tutorial each week. Similarly to APSC 131, you’ll have different professors depending on what unit you’re learning, with about 3 different professors throughout the entire semester.

Practice/quiz/exam questions are also very similar to APSC 132 and tend to be more situational. Many students considered this to be one of the lighter courses of second semester, especially since they were already familiarized with the course format from APSC 131.

BEST EXAM TIPS

1. talk to professors before they’re done teaching

You’ll have various profs throughout the semester, not just one. That being said, the profs from the first half of the semester won’t be around by the time the exam comes around. So make sure you ask all of your exam questions to profs before they leave, because it’s WAY harder to reach them once they’ve left. We found the chem profs were very insightful about what we needed to study to do well on the exam.

2. Find previous exams, if possible

The formatting of questions on exams tend to be a bit different than many of the tutorial/practice questions, and I found they prepared me the most for the exam/midterm. If the teaching team doesn’t make these exams available, all good! Check exam bank, and they’ll sometimes release review problems for each unit (the questions at the end of these documents are generally the ones that have been on previous exams. Remember that this course was redone not so long ago, so there aren’t many previous exams to go off of.

3. Understand the equations

Your formula sheet is your lifeline for the exam. When practicing for the exam, make sure you use the exact formula sheet they’ll give you for the exam so you can navigate quickly and efficiently. Also make sure you understand EVERY equation on the sheet and their use cases… don’t be surprised if they give you a question that requires one of these lesser-known equations.

4. Perfect your integration

One thing is for sure: you’ll DEFINITELY have at least one integration question on the midterm/final exam (the type where you need to show your entire calculations). It’s not enough to just know the final integrated version of the expression you’re working with — you’ll need to know how to complete every step of integration to get full marks. Check the videos we’ve attached for help with this.

5. Don’t get discouraged by question difficulty

In my humble opinion, both APSC 131 and APSC 132 midterms were some of the hardest we had to write… as in we all left the room feeling pretty defeated. HOWEVER — we were always pleasantly surprised with how generous the marking was. Although this might be different for Sci ‘28, I found the midterm/exam questions were always a little harder than expected. IT’S BETTER TO WRITE SOMETHING THAN NOTHING. I remember getting points for an “attempted calculation” which was entirely wrong.

So if you ever feel like you’re overwhelmed by the question difficulty on the exam… don’t worry! As long as you’ve studied and you’re doing your best to answer the question, you’ll be more than fine.

HELPFUL VIDEOS

HELPFUL VIDEOS

Integration - 1st Order Reaction

INTEGRATION

Concept Explanation - Integrated Rate Laws

ELECTROCHEMISTRY

Good for an intro to Galvanic Cells

Good for learning how to draw cell diagrams (will probably watch a quiz question). No need to watch entire video