Does It Work?
What Do Other People Do?


Does it Work?

Juniata College has been teaching the Organic First curriculum since 1993. There is anecdotal and quantitative evidence on its effectiveness, although admittedly neither is adequate to answer the question definitively.

On the anecdotal side, we can report that Juniata’s physical chemist believes there has been an improvement in the performance of the students in his class; however, there have been changes in the physics and math courses also, which prevents any attribution of cause. In addition, we can report that in exit interviews of graduating chemistry majors conducted by non-faculty, satisfaction with the department offerings has remained high through the transition from old curriculum to new. Finally, graduates continue to be as successful as ever in getting into and doing well in graduate and medical schools.

Quantitative evidence is sketchy at best. As one might imagine, it is hard to figure out what standardized tests are appropriate measures of what the students know, when the curriculum does not offer the standard courses. For years before the change, we had given the ACS first-year test to first-year students and the ACS organic test to sophomores, but the first-year students no longer are taking "first-year" chemistry, so they cannot take that test after the first year. The ACS organic test did not seem appropriate for our students at any level.

We arrived at the following compromise: we gave the ACS first-year test to our juniors. We figured by that time they had experience with all the material covered in the exam, and they had enough time to forget it. Sure enough, we were right: the chart below shows performance on the ACS first-year test by our juniors, both before (red) and after the curriculum change. The students’ performance was depressingly low, considering that as junior chemistry majors, they should have a pretty good handle on first-year chemistry, but they scored only at about the 60th percentile. In the first year, the students showed a nice 10–20 percentile improvement with the new curriculum, until 1999, when they did worse than ever. Was this an aberration, or were the improvements of the intervening years accidental? We simply do not know yet.
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