And no, I’m not talking about errors, I’m talking about something way more subtle. I recently came across a post in the AP Facebook group that illustrates one of my favorite mantras quite nicely, so I thought it was worth a quick blog post. Firstly the mantra. Using a textbook as a guide as to what to teach in an AP course is a terrible idea, especially for the inexperienced Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for textbooks as reference sources (I have hundreds of them in my possession), but you’d better not use them as a primary source of AP chemistry material. That’s a rookie error than can cost i ..read more

While I was recently updating the Mapped AP FRQ Worksheets to add the 2021, 2022 and 2023 FRQs, I came across multiple errors in the Chief Examiner’s reports for 2021 and 2022. Here’s a summary of those errors. 2021 I have found two errors in the 2021 report. The first is a typo on the breakdown of Q6(b) where what I assume is supposed to be SAP-5.B is reported as SAB-5.B. The second is less trivial, since it assigns SPQ-5.A (7.11) to Q6(c). That’s impossible since the LO references Ksp and there is no Ksp given. It would have to be associated with some kind of particulate based LO, perhaps SA ..read more

I’m pretty sure that there’s an error in the 2022 AP Chemistry Chief Examiner’s Report. It assigns LO TRA-8.B (TOPIC 7.10) to Q2(f) of the released, 2022 Free Response Questions. Utilizing the Kp expression determined in part (e), students were provided the equilibrium partial pressure for all gas species and asked to calculate the value of Kp in part (f) (TRA-8.B, 5.C). Here’s the original question, and the LO in more detail. I think that Q2(f) should be assigned to TRA-7.B (TOPIC 7.4), which reads, Am I wrong? The post Error in the 2022 AP Chemistry Chief Examiner’s Report? appeared firs ..read more

One way or another I’ve spent the best part of four decades immersed in the world of secondary chemistry education. My experience is more diverse than most, and covers a lot of ground, but a large part of it has enabled me to do some detailed comparisons of post-16 chemistry courses, i.e., to compare and contrast A-level (UK), AP chemistry (US), and IB (international). Most educators are likely to be acquainted with only one of those courses, and if IB hasn’t been your ‘thing’ it’s unlikely that you are not familiar with (if you’ve even heard of it at all) the van Arkel–Ketelaar triangle. If y ..read more

The CED (Course and Exam Description) for AP chemistry is chock-full of edubabble BS and always has been. So in and of itself, coming across weird stuff that makes no sense is nothing new, but recently a couple of things came to my attention that had escaped me previously, that make absolutely no sense. Now before I go on it’s worth noting that we’ve seen problems with the CED before including where the AP Chemistry Czar himself admitted that there were statements that are not factually accurate persisting in the CED. That’s in addition to things that were plain wrong in the original CED regar ..read more

What do China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the USA and Iraq have in common? They all appear in the Death Penalty Information Center’s (DPIC) top 6 nations* in the world for confirmed executions in 2022. *Execution totals unknown for North Korea, Vietnam, Syria, and Afghanistan  A couple of weeks ago I was researching and writing a piece about the Group 15 elements. Plenty of people know the collective names for the elements of groups 1, 2, 17 and 18 (alkali metals, alkaline earth metals, halogens and noble gases), but groups 15 and 16 have slightly more obscure names; the pnictogens and ch ..read more

The annual student struggle with acid-base chemistry usually revolves around questions that deal with weak acids and bases. If you pause to think about that for a moment, the difficulties are actually coalesce around equilibrium and not so much around acid-base chemistry per se. This means that much of the pain of UNIT 8 – and there’s plenty – can be pre-empted in UNIT 7, before we even get to the traditionally tortuous struggles with buffers and the like. In my opinion, the key to reducing some of the pain-points here is to emphasize that the six Ks (Kc, Kp, Ksp, Ka, Kb, and Kw) encountered ..read more

A  common post in the AP Chemistry Teacher Facebook group goes something like, “Are state symbols required in chemical equations?” There’s a temptation to answer question with a blanket, “no”, since when you read the scoring standards from several recent exams you’ll see a pretty consistent, “Ignore state symbols” or, “State symbols not required”. However, that feels like only part of the picture for me. As a side note that’s not especially relevant to the specific question at hand but is related, is that such notes in the scoring standards sit awkwardly against the fact that every equati ..read more

The AP Chemistry Course & Exam Description (CED) is the document that tells teachers the content can be examined on the AP Chemistry exam in May of each year. As an AP Chemistry teacher, the CED is the single most important guide to the teaching of the course, so when questions arise about what content is in – and just as importantly what content is out – is it just as simple as searching the CED to find the relevant phrase? Unfortunately, the answer is no. I often see AP Chemistry teachers ask questions such as, “Should I teach combustion analysis” followed by, “I searched ..read more

When the College Board deliver their annual propaganda relating to the latest AP Chemistry exam and released FRQs, I like to be there in person to hear the information from the horse’s mouth. That particular horse came in the form of three people this year, only one of whom is a permanent CB employee. The official CB presentation and the de-brief of the 2023 exam was split into three parts at ChemEd23 in Guelph, Ontario, Canada last month. A quick presentation about labs in AP chemistry, an update about AP Classroom and the lowering of standards on the AP exam, and finally the line by line de ..read more