9354722 Reingold We are completely restructuring the material traditionally covered in the first three years of college chemistry curricula. Our new structure solves many of the problems we and others have found with the traditional approach, including the widely advertised shortcomings of the freshman course and the less-widely acknowledged problems with the organic course, chief among which is the fact that it covers too much synthetic chemistry and too little biochemistry for the majority of the students taking it, who tend to be biology and premedical students. Our solution is to move the organic course to the freshman year and tailor it to its audience, emphasizing biomedical connections and removing much of the pure synthetic organic chemistry. Obviously, this has a trickle-down effect on the rest of the curriculum: some of what used to be freshman chemistry is now being taught in the sophomore year, as inorganic and analytical chemistry, and the parts of organic omitted from the freshman year are being addressed in the junior year. The restructuring has also given us the opportunity to work with the biology department in a complete overhaul of labs for the first two years, resulting in a joint freshman lab experience and an intensification of the sophomore lab experience. Finally, we have created a course designed to introduce our environmental science program. Overall we expect this new curriculum to serve both chemistry students and students in the other sciences better than the old curriculum.
