mobius323 (Offline)  

Oh, that's because the BSP and CCC modules have joint lectures for the first few, forgot about that. It looks like the timetables are similar so your optionals will probably be spread across tuesday, wednesday morning and thursday like ours were. If they haven't moved the physics it should be a 9am and an 11am lecture on a thursday, the special topics would be midday on a tuesday and 10am on wednesday.

The labs part is easiest to answer: You can leave when you have completed the experiment and had your notes signed by a demonstrator. Early on, you'll be lucky to get out early at all, but in some of the semester 2 labs (which have both sessions on one day) you should be able to fit in almost all the work in the morning, especially if you work well with your partner. There were a couple of sessions where my partner and I were able to simply sign in and straight back out of an afternoon session, having completed the work in the morning.

As to the timetabling of the options, it would help if I knew whether they were keeping the same timetable as last year. Do you have labs monday morning and friday afternoon, and BSP,CCC,BSP from 9-12 on a tuesday?

For 1st year, the core module exams are 2 hours, consisting of 4 questions worth 25% of the grade. The 1st question is always a multiple choice section of around 20 questions, while the remaining 3 are free choice from 4 or 5 possible written answer questions.

Other modules which do exams (1st semester modules before christmas, 2nd semester in the exam time around may) follow a similar format, with 1 hour papers consisting of 3 questions, the first being several multiple choice question and the remaining 2 free choice from 3 or 4 options.

The CCC (organic) module also has 2 course tests which are a little less formal in style taken during the regular teaching time, which are around an hour long, while the Physical chemistry module had 2 online multiple choice course tests during teaching time, each of which had 3 or 4 precursor tests which you had to complete before the test day in order to be allowed to take the course test.

The rest of the assessments are various coursework assignments. Once you have your UEA intranet login I can send you a link to the past papers.

They gave us lab coats and specs (we got spare specs free from the RSC as well), but if you need to buy one, the easiest is just to get them from the shop on campus (either the post office or News shop, can't really remember which, but they're next to each other anyway). They're about 15 quid and come with the uea logo embroidered on. That's where I'm getting my replacement from.

Oh, and make sure you have one of these calculators, as they're the only types allowed in exams (people got theirs confiscated in exams this year, making them fail the paper)

Casio fx-83ES
Casio fx-83 MS
Casio fx-83 WA
Casio fx-85ES
Casio fx-85MS
Casio fx-85WA
Casio fx-83GTPLUS*
Casio fx-85GTPLUS*
Sharp EL-531 Range – any version

Hey, I can't seem to post on the UEA applicants thread at the moment, so here goes:
If they're still giving you the textbooks (I'm not sure on that) they'll be the same three we got, that is Atkins physical 9th edition, which is just under 1000 A4 pages long, Clayden, Greeves, Warren and Wothers Organic Chemistry, at 1500 A4 pages and Shriver and Atkins Inoganic at around 900 A4 pages. They have a combined weight of approximately 8 kilograms and contain pretty much all the core material for the entire masters course, plus a bunch of bits that are useful but not on the core course. They're pretty easy to use, if not to carry.

As to lab safety, they're much stricter at uni than they were at my school, we never had lab coats either, but they are a must for uea labs (I'm buying a new one for this year as my old one came in holes after a conc. sulphuric acid accident.)