Forbess adds that the course head, Lecturer on Chemistry and Chemical Biology Garry Procter, takes pains to ensure that all the students understand his lectures.

“I think [the professor] tries to...explain things very thoroughly so that anyone could catch on. I don’t think he assumes that everyone is a super-smart Harvard student,” she adds.

Like Chiu, Jason S. Andersen ’05—who is also enrolled in Chem S-20ab—chose to become pre-med a bit late in the game.

“I didn’t start [the pre-med requirements] until the spring of my junior year,” says Andersen, who graduated this past June but still has one pre-med requirement—organic chemistry—to fulfill before he can apply to medical schools.

Chem S-20ab has, with 257 students, the largest enrollment of any course at the Summer School. In fact, it has more than twice as many students as the next largest course, Philosophy S-4, “Introduction to Philosophy.”

But unlike that philosophy course, Chem S-20ab comes with a prerequisite that precludes enrollment by many high schoolers—as well as a warning in the course description that it is “not recommended for high school students.”

Neugeboren says that one of the courses he teaches, Economics S-1010, “Microeconomic Theory,” which is the summer counterpart to Economics 1010a and requires a calculus-level entrance exam, has no high-school students among its 11 members.

The Summer School Registrar Susan E. McGee says that her office does not tally how many Harvard College students are enrolled in each course, so exact enrollment statistics are not available.

MAKING THE GRADE

The perception that Chem S-20ab is less stressful when taken during the summer aside, some students say the course’s structure make it easier to excel than in the term-time version.

Unlike in Chem 20 and Chem 30, where the letter scale is used for every assignment, the quizzes and labs in Chem S-20ab are graded as satifactory or unsatisfactory.

And Forbess says that the mean grade for the first weekly test was a 92.4.

James C. Lee ’06, a Chemistry concentrator who is a lab teaching fellow for Chemistry S-20ab, says the course was “a little easier in grading” to compensate for the compression of a year’s worth of content into two months.

“If I’d taken it over the summer, I would have gotten better grades. But I have no regrets about taking it during the year,” Lee says, adding that engaging the material for a full year was the best way to go about learning it.

Enrolling in summer school to boost one’s GPA is evidenced even more outside of the realm of challenging quantitative and language courses.