Lesson Plans

Chemistry: The Central Science 9th Edition ©2003

by Brown, LeMay, and Bursten

Weeks 29–30: Review and AP* Exam Practice

Besides learning the subject as thoroughly as possible it is important for students to have practice taking an exam. If the tests during the course were designed to be mini exams the students should by now be pretty well prepared. The object of this lesson is to review by actually taking the complete exam, and also, see how the whole exam is constructed and how it will be graded.

College Board Performance Objectives:

• Be able to take an entire exam and perform as well as possible.
• Understand how the exam is graded, and realize that no student is expected to know all of the answers.
• Realize that students are given choices of problems to answer in the Free Response section.
• Realize that students are given partial credit for what they have right about the working of each problem.
• Understand how important it is to write legibly and show work in an organized fashion.

College Board Lab Objectives:

Suggested Labs:

Resources:

• Instructor's Resource Manual
• Student's Guide
• Test Bank
• "1994 AP Chemistry Free-Response Guide with Multiple Choice Section" and "1999 AP Chemistry Released Exam", published by the College Board
• "Packet of 10 AP Chemistry Exams", published by the College Board for each of the years 1994 and 1999

Pacing Guide:

• A complete exam from a previous year should be selected that all students will take over 2–3 days of class and at home. On the third day the correct answers can be posted for students to check how they did. Have them use the Scoring Guidelines for that year's exam to calculate the score that they would have gotten had the exam been graded by the exam readers. In this way students will see first hand how their work will be evaluated and it will show them the things that they can do to improve their scores when they take the exam. During this "correcting" time any question that was generally problematic could be gone over. This is a great time to have those students who did work the problem correctly show the rest of the class how they did it. After this "correcting" session, another year's exam can be assigned and completed the same way. At least two complete exams should be able to be taken this way.
• Block Scheduling
  Students will be able to complete the first exam by the middle of the second block. This will allow "correcting" time during the second half of the block. The other two blocks will then be uses to take another year's exam.

Key Words:

Suggested Exercises:

Troubleshooting Tips/Error Traps:

• Stress that no one is expected to make a perfect or near-perfect score on the multiple-choice section (Section I) of so comprehensive an exam.
• Make students realize that they will be given some choice among the questions in Section II of the exam.
• For the exam, students will be expected to know chemical nomenclature and the solubility rules.
• It is very important that the students realize that in Section II they must demonstrate their skills in reasoning and problem solving. Therefore, it is extremely important that they show each step of how they arrived at an answer and that they write legibly.
• Stress that readers will give partial credit for each step of a problem or any logical reasoning, even if it is not completely correct.