Finals begin

Even though instruction is still ongoing, tonight was the written final exam for my organic chemistry lab class. I had done the practice exams fairly successfully, so I was mainly concerned about just one thing: only non-programmable scientific calculators were allowed. I have a programmable scientific calculator and a simple (four-function plus square root) calculator, but some of the calculations done in class used logarithms. So I spent some time before the exam figuring out how to approximate the log function with only the functions available to me. I prepared three different ways that work in the context of the relevant type of problem, but it turned out that there was no such question on the exam. Overall the real final was much easier than the practice worksheets.