Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Initial impressions...(updated!)
First of all, I want to thank you for the maturity and diligence that you demonstrated today. To see "all" ( 99.9% !) of my students voluntarily stay for at least 2.5 hours and to have many of you "go the distance" makes me so proud of you.
My initial glance at the part I grades:
VERY GOOD! I am REALLY IMPRESSED especially with the REGENTS class multiple-choice performance (Honors did great so far, too)!
SIX students are still in the running for a 100!!! These students all frequently attended the Regents review sessions.
About a dozen of you got only ONE wrong; the questions involved:
a CATALYST gives a reaction an "alternate pathway" that has a LOWER ACTIVATION ENERGY. Anyone who drew a PE diagram showing the catalyzed and uncatalyzed paths naturally got this right. Also, the "alternate pathway" phrase is VERBATIM from the review book and the NY State Regents standards AND I repeated that mantra with "finger quotes" (though not rock n' roll finger quotes) in class, many times.
Also, some of you did not convert Kelvin to Celsius correctly. That is an error that anyone can make but usually gets corrected on a double-check. Oh well, 49 out of 50 isn't bad.
This exam was SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult than last June's exam, though not difficult at all to pass. The exam was similar in difficulty to the one in January; there were REAL chemistry questions, some of which forced you to think or draw out what was happening. Most of the quantitative questions REQUIRED, for the FIRST TIME IN YEARS, an ACTUAL CALCULATION instead of the bogus "correct numerical setup". As I warned, do the test the right way and you are prepared for changes such as the ones just mentioned!
My initial glance at the part I grades:
VERY GOOD! I am REALLY IMPRESSED especially with the REGENTS class multiple-choice performance (Honors did great so far, too)!
SIX students are still in the running for a 100!!! These students all frequently attended the Regents review sessions.
About a dozen of you got only ONE wrong; the questions involved:
a CATALYST gives a reaction an "alternate pathway" that has a LOWER ACTIVATION ENERGY. Anyone who drew a PE diagram showing the catalyzed and uncatalyzed paths naturally got this right. Also, the "alternate pathway" phrase is VERBATIM from the review book and the NY State Regents standards AND I repeated that mantra with "finger quotes" (though not rock n' roll finger quotes) in class, many times.
Also, some of you did not convert Kelvin to Celsius correctly. That is an error that anyone can make but usually gets corrected on a double-check. Oh well, 49 out of 50 isn't bad.
This exam was SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult than last June's exam, though not difficult at all to pass. The exam was similar in difficulty to the one in January; there were REAL chemistry questions, some of which forced you to think or draw out what was happening. Most of the quantitative questions REQUIRED, for the FIRST TIME IN YEARS, an ACTUAL CALCULATION instead of the bogus "correct numerical setup". As I warned, do the test the right way and you are prepared for changes such as the ones just mentioned!
# posted by C @ 5:46 PM 
