Review:
Warning to Freshman: Prof. Morse may seem amiable but in hindsight, in my opinion, he's one of the poorest teachers on campus. When I was a Freshman I had never taken a college level course, so when I didn't understand the material I thought it was my fault. After failing his class I joined another Chem 1 class and passed easily; I realized that Morse's Chem 1 class is NOT a normal freshman chemistry seminar. Prof. Morse does not know how to teach a class: he knows a great deal about Chemistry, but he has no idea how to impart this knowledge onto the students.

He tries to act incredibly jovial and socialize with the students but ultimately this didn't change the fact that if I asked a question about something he just said, all he's do was restate it using the exact same phrase as before.

He also has impossible officer hours. He spends much of his time socializing, AIMing, etc.; most importantly he actually teaches French classes in the language department, so many times as soon as class ends he rushes out to get there and no one can ask questions. Maybe he's trying to impress people by teaching two subjects. I don't know. What I do know is I learned less in his class than any other class I ever took. I failed out of Chem 1 with Morse, took another Prof's Chem 1 clas and passed with relative ease.

Another major flaw in his teaching style; during review classes he'd hand out of pack of practice problems, tell us to do them, and in the last 10 minutes try to explain it really quickly. In my other Chem 1 class the prof would ask if we had questions, someone would give him one, and then my other prof would slowly go through the problem step by step.

Workload:
Professor Morse's homework distribution is woefully incompetent, if his ultimate goals is to teach anyone how to do it: he makes up his own problems, by combining three or four unrelated concepts into a very difficult combined problem. For example, you might have to figure out a combustion problem, then you have to use your answer for that as the information in a mixture problem, after which you use your answer to the mixture problem as the info for finding out how many electrons are generated by the reactions. I had to retake Chem 1 with other teachers and they used the more standardized questions, and never did anything like this. Most important, if you get the first part of a problem wrong, individual segments of a problem aren't graded separately. I mean he was combining problems from separate units. He is obviously a man that enjoys crossword puzzles, etc. as the homework problems which he designed himself seemed more like novelty brainteasers than practice that would aid me in understanding a concept.

All in all, Morse made up his own horrifically difficult problems with little thought in mind as to how well we could do them, because he was trying to impress everyone with how much he knows. He has failed to grasp the concept that knowing alot about the material is not his job; his job is to impart this knowledge upon me.

Worse, Morse and his TA's routinely take off upwards of 20% off of any test or homework set because of significant figures. Example: If the answer is 25.0055 and you put down 25.0044, he will not give credit.

Other professors teaching Chem 1 at Tufts A) Used standardized problems and B) Did not obsess over significant figures 3 months after that unit.

No one even learns anything by giving this much homework: literally the entire class of 200 people arrange "study groups" which actually amounted to swapping answers rather than doing the entire set, because few understood what he told us. I never learned anything trading answers with other people, but it was all I could do.

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