An argument for fewer labs

Any undergraduate at Duke who aspires to practice medicine later in life must at first complete, among other training, Chemistry 151 and 152, or Orgo I and II for short. Generally considered the most challenging courses offered on the path to medical school, both include a weekly graded three-hour lab portion.

Each lab session requires completion of a short pre-lab assignment prior to arrival. These assignments take, on average, between 15 and 30 minutes to complete. Lab sessions are then followed by lab reports, longer and more conclusive assignments that vary in length each week. However, between meeting with a partner, organizing data, executing calculations and writing the report itself, any lab report takes somewhere around an hour, give or take. This means that on a good week, lab still takes up at least four hours of a student’s time. On a bad week, it can devour as many as six.

Although six hours is not the most significant portion of one’s week (only 5 percent of waking hours for a student that sleeps eight hours a night), this lost time becomes a little more worrisome in light of lab’s impracticality. As any professor will tell you, organic chemistry is a class that concerns itself chiefly with how individual molecules and atoms interact with each other on a microscopic level. Trying to study those intimate interactions by dousing billions of molecules against one another and observing them with the naked eye is a bit like setting two friends up on a blind date in a massive arena concert and hoping to keep tabs on them by watching from somewhere on the moon. Not only is such an approach utterly hopeless, it is in direct contradiction with the espoused nature of the subject.

Furthermore, time and financial restraints reduce techniques to a cruder form than they take in professional settings: drying a precipitate consists of pressing it between pieces of filter paper, and purifying recrystallization processes usually just result in a total loss of product.

Even if lab isn’t educationally illuminating or representative of a graduate-level research facility, some believe that the cushion points garnered there make it worthwhile. Unfortunately, an easy grade that helps everyone really helps no one when the class is curved. The grades across different sections are usually controlled for any variance in grading as well, either by normalization or careful review. For the most part, lab grades provide a huge boost in a final grade relative to itself but do little to change a grade relative to the curve.

For all of these shortcomings, there may be one thing lab does in abundance, and that is spend University money. Although numbers are not easily available, it is not unreasonable to assume that between raw materials for hundreds of students each week, TA compensation and the cost of facilities and special waste disposal, lab most likely represents some sort of a drain on department or University resources. Those expenditures may be negligible compared to the funds that a university like Duke has at its disposal, but it seems to be an ill-advised allocation of resources where there is so little to be gained.

On top of that, the opportunity cost alone for students and TAs is overwhelming. It’d almost be more effective to place everyone into a mandatory six-hour-a-week study hall, à la middle school. At least that way students and TAs could interact in a more meaningful environment with some hope of contributing to further understanding of the subject. Of course, this is the role that the weekly 50-minute recitation period is supposed to fill. At any rate, the department could save us all some much needed time and money by moving to a biweekly lab schedule.

By diminishing the number of hours a student spends on Science Drive, it is possible that the department would relinquish the focus that some students give its subject. Six fewer hours in lab a week will translate in many cases to six more hours in front of the television or on the quad. For some students, though, six extra hours with their books will boost their grades in a way that lab can’t. Besides, students should be allowed to allocate their study time in whatever way they see fit, and if that time still ends up getting wasted, at least it would be without the help of the University.