Physical chemistry curriculum chemical kinetics

Barth, R. (1992). Mass balance in the physical chemistry curriculum - An improved approach to chemical kinetics. Journal of Chemical Education, 69, 622-623. 

The problems are the ultimate deliverable in a physical chemistry course. If you can t do the problems, you can t do physical chemistry. Students know this, and focus on the problems, sometimes to the exclusion of reading the text. As a result, I suspect students primary sense of what the field of physical chemistry comprises, and what it might be useful for, arises directly from the problems assigned. What message do students take home from the problems While a thorough inventory of the problems available to physical chemistry instructors would be most instructive, the problems collected in Table I, culled from the chapters on chemical kinetics in a number of physical chemistry texts, illustrate the challenges facing the curriculum. 

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