Call me crazy. (Many have.) I have neither the intention nor the desire to become a chemistry major. I do, however, desperately want to learn more about the subject. In the short term, that means I would really like to take organic chemistry.

But I can't. Yet.

The chemistry department, as it was relayed to me, will only exempt students from introductory chemistry classes if they have earned a sufficiently high score on the chemistry Advanced Placement test, regardless of a given student's ability to actually do chemistry. In practice, this means I am forced to take an extraordinarily boring introductory chemistry class.

At first, I thought it would not be that painful. I doubt anyone has ever suffered from earning an A in a chemistry class. Now, however, I have come to realize that introductory chemistry may sound the death knell for my career in science.

As I write this, I have just completed my first lab report for the chemistry course's lab portion. It took me somewhere between seven and ten hours to perform the calculations and typeset the lab in LaTeX. The chemistry department has a strict "absolutely everything must be typed" policy, and the prospect of inserting equation after equation in Word, using its clunky equation editor was not appealing.

In most circumstances, spending somewhere between seven and ten hours composing an assignment would not merit any mention, especially here. But this lab report was, in essence, a seven page paper explaining how to convert one type of units into another. Take this particularly snappy passage from my lab report:

This kind of lab undoubtedly has pedagogical value for someone who has little or no experience with chemistry. For someone with a strong background in chemistry, however, this kind of explanation is nothing short of excruciatingly painful. To draw a comparison for those without a background in chemistry, the above excerpt would be akin to a calculus student explaining how to multiply two numbers.

What really depressed me, though, was a quick flip through some of the other chemistry-related documents on my hard drive. Compare what I wrote for my college-level introductory chemistry class to what I was writing two years ago in high school:

It's really quite disheartening.

And, really, I owe this pain to Bates' lack of placement tests. As standardized tests go, the AP tests are easily the best I've taken. They do a reasonably good job of gauging how well students learned the material the AP includes in its curriculum. But they do not, nor are they designed to, provide an accurate gauge of how much a student knows about a specific subject in the broadest terms.

Thus, I have become a supporter of placement tests. While I can only speculate, I have little doubt I would be a much happier person if I could test out of introductory chemistry.