"Enamine Ltd" is a leading Ukrainian CRO organization and a global provider of screening compounds and building blocks. To further development, the company is constantly expanding its team of highly skilled chemists, biologists, and engineers. While hiring students of chemistry faculties, we have noticed a problem known as the "skill gap". Often the students know all the necessary information, but are unable to use it, either because of insufficient understanding or lack of general skills in applying their existing knowledge to new problems. In light of the existing complication, we have decided to "grow" specialists we want to see in our laboratories starting from the 1st year of their studying in a university. Keeping in mind that the students, we are going to work with, have no or a little previous experience in the laboratory, we have designed an introductory experimental work aiming at teaching and assessing basic organic synthesis and identification skills.
The work is based on the well-known hydrazone formation reaction of benzaldehydes with Brady's reagent. As we see, it perfectly matches the chasing goal as requires minimal setup, does not involve toxic, flammable, or explosive materials with all operations carried out at room temperature and normal pressure as well as takes only about 3 hours. At the same time, the work allows one to fasten such primary laboratory skills as a measurement of mass of a solid substance; the measurement of volume of a liquid; the use of laboratory apparatus for filtration under reduced pressure; making calculations of yields; neatness and accuracy in doing the work.
Apart from teaching, we paid especial attention to the quantitative assessment of students' skills based on the yield and the products' quality control (¹H NMR and water content). Observing the performance of 196 students for 3 years, we identified 8 common mistakes that the students make. Further, we carried out a comprehensive analysis of how the mistakes contribute to the products' yield, purity as well as time required for the accomplishment of the experiment. The study helps answer the question "What did students do wrong?" based on their results.

Figure 1.

Olexander Vitsenko

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