I got A’s in Organic, but B’s in P-Chem!!!
I was proud of those B’s. There may not have been any A’s, and there were all too many D’s and F’s!!
D’s and F’s were not supposed to happen at MIT, and the old professor who served as chemistry student advocate complained about them. I don’t remember what happened with those complaints. I imagine that many Chem majors took P-Chem over with a different professor and passed.
Since I was a Bio major, my high grades in Organic and P-Chem made me very unpopular with Chem majors—for awhile. However, they eventually shrugged it off, and we returned to being friends!
My father got a B in P-Chem — the only B he ever got in his life, grade school through medical school. Otherwise straight As. Of course, he was working full time to help support his parents and brother at the time, too. I remember him telling me that because of his work schedule, he and a friend got permission to use the lab one weekend and they ran the whole semester’s labs simultaneously and wrote them up by Monday morning.
I was never that kind of student, but by golly I got an A in P-Chem! Never used it for anything throughout my career.