Biology labs VS Chemistry labs in college

[tennisball80]

-Which one is more tedious ?
-Which one requires longer lab report ?
-What's your experience with Bio lab or Chem lab in college ?

I don't like labs very much personally.

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[Vicviper]

Well, there's Labs and then there's Upper Division Labs. Everyone takes standard Bio and Chem labs, but depending on your major, you'll take different Upper Division labs, which are normally more in depth and require more work, but it really depends. My school (UCI) requires that bio majors take 3 Upper Division labs, and for one of them I picked Fresh Water Field Ecology and it was totally awesome, every day was a field trip and we went to different wetlands and took water samples and such, and there were like 4 lab write ups about 4 pages each.

Chem, Bio, and Physics labs are all about the same, and it really depends on your teacher. Chem lab is normally very easy, but depending on the teacher, you may be required to do more or less work for the post-labs / lab reports. I loved chem labs in college (especially Ochem), I thought they were fun.

General Bio labs are normally easy, and I find that Bio professors often assign less work as far as write ups go.

Physics labs are normally the most complicated and require the most work for writeups and reports, but it depends on the teacher. I found Physics labs the most interesting though, because you do some really cool experiments.

Hope that helps.

 

[DrQuack247]

-Which one is more tedious ?
-Which one requires longer lab report ?
-What's your experience with Bio lab or Chem lab in college ?

I don't like labs very much personally.

Chemistry in general is more tedious
They are also longer
I took inorganic and physical chemistry courses that required very long lab reports. They took a full days work + some more to complete.
The intro course labs are all similar and much easier obviously.

 

[JJMrK]

At my school:

Chem labs are usually long, hard, and can be tedious. A lot of record keeping/write ups to do. IMO though, they're the most worthwhile.

Bio labs are easy and often a waste of time.

Physics labs are in between the other two. Some can be very complicated, some are pretty easy. Quite a bit of write up time required, but not as much as chemistry.

 

[TRN1983]

-Which one is more tedious ?
-Which one requires longer lab report ?
-What's your experience with Bio lab or Chem lab in college ?

I don't like labs very much personally.

Bio has been much worse for me. I've had 30 pg lab reports where every single detail of every procedure has to be included, explained, etc.

 

[slight365]

I'd say chem labs are more tedious, especially due to the quantitative evaluation the professors base a lot of the grade on.

I'd also worry about physics. I've had to deal with lab reports that took 5 solid days of writing and calculating, 12 times a semester. On top of that, the TA's did not give out A's. I even had a near perfect lab report, and he removed 11 points for some grammatical and proofreading. We were allowed to interpret the procedure, which I did, and they found some stuff that wasn't even wrong or missing.

 

[Maygyver]

At my school:

Chem labs are usually long, hard, and can be tedious. A lot of record keeping/write ups to do. IMO though, they're the most worthwhile.

Bio labs are easy and often a waste of time.

Physics labs are in between the other two. Some can be very complicated, some are pretty easy. Quite a bit of write up time required, but not as much as chemistry.

I concur. My general bio labs were ******ed. (this doesn't include micro/upper div bio courses)

Chem was definitely a LOT more work than bio labs.

 

[Depakote]

They can both be a pain when you get into the upper levels...

Orgo lab was by far the biggest pain, but I think I had a genetics lab report that almost hit 30 pages. They wanted full Abstract, Materials and Methods, Data, Conclusion, Sources.

 

[Maygyver]

They can both be a pain when you get into the upper levels...

Orgo lab was by far the biggest pain, but I think I had a genetics lab report that almost hit 30 pages. They wanted full Abstract, Materials and Methods, Data, Conclusion, Sources.

You mean you don't like spending 4 hours synthesizing your product and then accidentally dissolving it all when you mean to recrystallize?

 

[medstar21]

I feel like its really hard to generalize what it is like at all schools, I'm sure it varies somewhat but as for me:

the actually chem labs themselves sucked much worse. They are just a pain, and if you arent interested in chem, sometimes, it seems like what you are doing is pointless. I am however a bio person, so I always found these more interesting. But once again, most labs seem trivial and somewhat boring.

As for the write-ups, for chem ours weren't too bad. Bio wasnt too bad either, but we did have a couple longer papers to write for one of my bio labs.

Like others have said, the upper level labs are much more time consuming. For my advanced micro lab, we had 4 lab reports each to be written up as if it was a scientific article to be publicized, which was kind of a pain, but then again, you get really good at writing those types of things through something like this.

 

[175961]

at my school:

Biology labs arent too bad. straight forward and usually taught by a masters student and if you get a cool one lab isnt a headache. intro level labs suck big time just because they treat you like idiots and have you do ******ed stuff since a lot of people that are taking it hate science and are doing it for general requirements. once you get into upper division labs they are more fun.

Chemistry labs arent too bad either....as long as your lab instructor is good. right now my instructor sucks and the lab reports he has us do are crazy hard. the experiments are pretty fun and like others have said, ochem lab is good. they arent really "strict" and you will generally get good results even if you screw something up (unless its a catastrophic screw up of course). I do have to take a quantitative analysis chem lab though and that one you have to be super precise in everything you do....so it all depends on what level youre at. even though I'm a micro major I'd probably make a better chemist than a biologist...we've learned a lot of different techniques in ochem lab. hmmmm

 

[TRN1983]

They can both be a pain when you get into the upper levels...

Orgo lab was by far the biggest pain, but I think I had a genetics lab report that almost hit 30 pages. They wanted full Abstract, Materials and Methods, Data, Conclusion, Sources.

I had to do this in the majority of my upper division Bio classes. Total pain.

 

[TRN1983]

I'm working on 2 right now in between sdn breaks. If they let us type it I could finish it in half the time but everything has to be in black ink, and my handwriting is awful.

Labs are fun when you get to design your own experiment and test a hypothesis. When you can already predict the outcome, yet you still have to write up 8000 pages of calculations, it's beyond tedious.
Still wouldn't trade being a science major for a major that lets one type papers

They seriously make you hand wright everything? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Most of my professors required that I type everything.

As for experiments, my classes were largely pretty cool b/c they didn't go over predictable stuff. But, I've had some super predictable labs, too and I can feel for ya on that.

 

[Isisfusion]

General Bio labs are probably the easiest labs anyone could imagine. Staring at laminated pictures of animals and drawing a phylogenetic tree is hardly what I call hard.

Gen Chemistry isn't that bad either, I'd say. True, they are tedious and take forever to get done, but the majority of lab points (at least where I go) go to the analysis, report questions, and conclusion. There were tons of times where I would rush through the lab just to get done and worked harder on my analysis and got As. It just takes more effort.