CHEM 2320      Organic Chemistry II



Credits:   4.0

Taught by:   Sarah Morgan Black

Semesters offered:   Fall and Spring

Formats:   classroom

Prerequisites:   Chem 2310 and 2315
Concurrent enrollment in Chem 2325 required.

Course Description:

Chemistry 2320 is the second of two semesters of organic chemistry offered at Dixie State College. You should also be registered for the accompanying lab, Chem 2325, unless you have taken it previously. You should have successfully completed Chem 2310, which will serve as the foundation for our continued study of organic chemistry.

The organic chemistry series will prepare you for upper division course work in pre-professional, science, and engineering programs. It will also help you to have a greater appreciation for the organic chemistry that happens all around (and inside) you every day.

Course Objectives:

When you are finished with this course, you should be able to:

  • Classify organic compounds and represent them appropriately using line structures. This semester will review alkanes, alkyl halides, alkenes, and alkynes, and introduce alcohols, ethers, aromatic rings, carboxylic acids, ketones, aldehydes, carbohydrates, amines, and proteins.
  • Explain the structures (hybridization, geometry, and polarity) and compare physical properties (boiling point, melting point, solubility, conformations, and stability) of organic compounds.
  • Use the rules of nomenclature to give correct names for organic compounds, draw correct structures that correspond to a name, and correctly use and recognize common names.
  • Use principles of stereochemistry to locate stereocenters and label stereoisomers, identify chiral compounds, give stereochemical relationships between molecules, use Fischer projections, solve optical activity problems, and identify stereochemical results of a reaction.
  • Use IR and NMR spectroscopy to characterize and identify organic compounds.
  • Give starting materials, reagents, and products for reactions of organic compounds.
  • Use mechanistic principles to recognize nucleophiles and electrophiles, acids, and bases, and correctly draw the mechanisms of selected reactions; also use mechanisms to predict the regio- and stereoselectivity of products.
  • Create multi-step syntheses by combining reactions.


Required Materials
  1. Organic Chemistry, sixth edition, by L. G. Wade (optional)
  2. Chem 2310 Student Materials by Sarah Morgan Black
  3. Molecular models
  4. A notebook, binder, or note cards to write chapter outlines in
This course continues to be based on the textbook, and you will have reading assignments from it. You are not required to purchase a copy, as it is quite expensive, but if you choose not to do so, you are responsible to locate a copy in order to do the reading assignments – two are on reserve the college library.

The material that we will be studying from the textbook has been condensed into the Chem 2320 Student Materials, which you must purchase from the Dixie College Bookstore. It contains reading assignments, notebook outlines, class notes, and homework problems. We will go through these notes in class, and you will turn this homework in for credit. You will also need a set of molecular models, which can be purchased at the bookstore; please bring your models to class each day. You will also need a notebook, binder, or set of note cards in which you will write your chapter outlines (you may continue to use the one from the previous semester).