Regionals Exams

[primitivepolonium]

Hey all,

I'm writing a regionals exam for Chem Lab and just a little bit confounded. How hard are regionals level exams supposed to be? For Chem Lab specifically, buffers are a state/nats only topic (I have NO idea why, every AP chemistry kid will have learned that stuff).

I and some others also wrote the MIT Chem Lab exam with the expectation that since Chem Lab closely follows AP Chemistry and Chemistry Olympiad in terms of content overlap, a lot of the stuff we tested would be stuff people knew. This was...not the case. I'm sure time pressure was part of it, but questions we thought were "easy" (because they were among the first 4 pages of google when you google said topic) turned out to not be that easy. Now I'm seriously not sure what the main demographic of Chem Lab is, and exactly what they know. When I competed in it, I rarely studied specifically for it because I did ChemOly. In other words, I did Chem Lab because I was learning chemistry, not learning Chemistry because I was doing Chem Lab.

I suppose the heart of my question is: am I supposed to write my exam as if I were writing for an AP Chemistry class, or is that too hard?

Thanks, everyone.

[John Richardsim]

Try having a range of difficulty.

[antoine_ego]

Perhaps try splitting it up into three sections. For example, Section A could be the basics, such as definitions, very simple concepts (such as atomic structure), and units/significant figures. Section B could contain more difficult problems, such as ones you'd typically find in an honors high school chemistry curriculum, such as titrations, stoichiometry, and similar things. They should be things you'd find in a standard high school textbook.Section C could contain much harder things, perhaps a spice of MO theory and the like. This would give a really wide range of difficulty, and can really differentiate teams, so long as you make it sufficiently long.

[primitivepolonium]

Try having a range of difficulty.

Yep, doing that. I have a spread of questions from super easy 1st year stuff to AP stuff; just working on the difficulty cap of questions and average difficulty.

I'm not 100% familiar with the region since I never competed there, but I've been told they're pretty high-achieving so I'm trying to balance between "discourages all the beginners" and "every 2nd year chem student sits in the back napping from boredom".

[Unome]

Hey all,

I'm writing a regionals exam for Chem Lab and just a little bit confounded. How hard are regionals level exams supposed to be? For Chem Lab specifically, buffers are a state/nats only topic (I have NO idea why, every AP chemistry kid will have learned that stuff).

I and some others also wrote the MIT Chem Lab exam with the expectation that since Chem Lab closely follows AP Chemistry and Chemistry Olympiad in terms of content overlap, a lot of the stuff we tested would be stuff people knew. This was...not the case. I'm sure time pressure was part of it, but questions we thought were "easy" (because they were among the first 4 pages of google when you google said topic) turned out to not be that easy. Now I'm seriously not sure what the main demographic of Chem Lab is, and exactly what they know. When I competed in it, I rarely studied specifically for it because I did ChemOly. In other words, I did Chem Lab because I was learning chemistry, not learning Chemistry because I was doing Chem Lab.

I suppose the heart of my question is: am I supposed to write my exam as if I were writing for an AP Chemistry class, or is that too hard?

Thanks, everyone.

Every AP Chem student will theoretically have learned buffers, but I can attest that one can do very well in AP Chem and barely understand them at all (despite the extreme competence of my AP Chem teacher). Although, in practice a substantial number of people who took AP Chem may not have learned buffers at all, if their teachers weren't very good.

I expect around half or slightly less of Chem Lab competitors at a typical regional tournament will have taken/are taking AP Chem.

My philosophy for writing regional tests so far has been to write them at 2/3 the length and difficulty that I initially think to write. It's worked alright so far - most of my regional tests have had high scores in the 60% range. That said, I have yet to administer a Div C regional test. If I really expect high scores to be a problem, I usually add a small number of problems at a substantially higher difficulty just in case.

[JoeyC]

As Unome and many others have said, make some easy questions to make sure the beginners feel that they can get better at this, then slowly increase the difficulty to very hard AP Chem; the "2nd year Chem" students will be challenged to an extent by the hard questions near the edge, and the "poor freshman that got put in the event 2 days before the competition" will see that the harder questions are just an extension of the easier ones (to a very large stretch extent). This encourages growth no matter what the experience. Chem's not too bad of a hard subject as some others like Circuits (which is impossible if you haven't studied it for a long timei couldn't figure out breadbox), so its not too hard to mix in easy and hard questions in the same test and get away with decent average results.