Tuesday, January 09, 2007
AP: Heed this!
AP: we had our Christmas vacation topics exam today. From a cursory look at your tests, only four (CLEARLY prepared) members of our class know what they are doing with these topics. The CARELESS errors due to LACK of proper annotation and use of units is going to result in SEVERE penalties on this and ALL future tests. Do NOT pretend that you do not know the requirements for a properly written exam. You could not claim naiveté even two months ago. Don't you realize by now that taking shortcuts and not explicitly labeling EVERYTHING in your answers always leads to confusion and wrong answers. Can't you be careful for your own sake? Merely memorizing formulas without THOROUGHLY and CLEARLY labeling what each variable means will not only NOT help you in AP Chemistry, but also you will lead you to illogical and insane answers. This was overtly apparent on some of the problems from your Thanksgiving assignment even though those were ALL review problems (on which you COULD HAVE asked for help!). Today, how is it that only two people could convert from percent mass to molarity???
If you had trouble with this test even though I went over any difficult questions in class (WHICH I DID NOT have to to do!) then you did not properly do the break assignment. When you have an assignment over a break, do NOT try to cram it in on the last few days of vacation. Do NOT try to learn a three week assignment in just one or two days before a test or by memorizing last year's test (that SHOULD be beneath you). That strategy, even if it "worked", will HURT you in the long run.
This course HAS NO VACATION (vacation starts on May 12th). There is NOT enough time in our schedule. You will have future "vacation" assignments. I post an extreme number of examples and tutorials for these assignments. You should do ALL of them or, at least enough of them so that, by the time you come back to school, you have great speed and facility with each problem type.
I CANNOT cover all of the major permutations of a given question type on EACH test (even though they are long tests!) so, in order to be prepared for the AP CHEM EXAM, you MUST do the preparation work/hw in this course! That is a MAJOR expectation of this course. That is the ONLY way to gain enough knowledge in a sufficient number of contexts in order to not be SURPRISED on the AP exam.
All of the questions on this test were asked in the most straightforward way. In the future, that may not be the case. Furthermore, only one of the two vacation topics was concentrated on this test. Our next test will have kinetics and some of the question types that we didn't get to on this test. We will have an in-class quiz later this week on descriptive chemistry and the transition metals chapter assignment.
If you had trouble with this test even though I went over any difficult questions in class (WHICH I DID NOT have to to do!) then you did not properly do the break assignment. When you have an assignment over a break, do NOT try to cram it in on the last few days of vacation. Do NOT try to learn a three week assignment in just one or two days before a test or by memorizing last year's test (that SHOULD be beneath you). That strategy, even if it "worked", will HURT you in the long run.
This course HAS NO VACATION (vacation starts on May 12th). There is NOT enough time in our schedule. You will have future "vacation" assignments. I post an extreme number of examples and tutorials for these assignments. You should do ALL of them or, at least enough of them so that, by the time you come back to school, you have great speed and facility with each problem type.
I CANNOT cover all of the major permutations of a given question type on EACH test (even though they are long tests!) so, in order to be prepared for the AP CHEM EXAM, you MUST do the preparation work/hw in this course! That is a MAJOR expectation of this course. That is the ONLY way to gain enough knowledge in a sufficient number of contexts in order to not be SURPRISED on the AP exam.
All of the questions on this test were asked in the most straightforward way. In the future, that may not be the case. Furthermore, only one of the two vacation topics was concentrated on this test. Our next test will have kinetics and some of the question types that we didn't get to on this test. We will have an in-class quiz later this week on descriptive chemistry and the transition metals chapter assignment.
# posted by C @ 12:30 PM 
