<p>My AP Chem teacher for next year recommend PR, but I don’t know what do you guys say? Also the good thing about this year’s AP exam is that we will be able to use calculators. </p>
<p>I took AP Chemistry last year as a junior and I didn’t really enjoy it, but I’m glad I took the class. I had a teacher who had never taught a college-level class before and I think I did alright on the exam. The material is difficult to grasp at first, even if you did well in general chem, but it’s not impossibly hard once you go over it a few times. I used Barron’s to study and I really liked it. There might have been a few minor errors in it, but nothing that will completely throw you off-guard and make you fail the exam. It honestly did help me understand everything I didn’t in class. I heard PR and Crash Course are good too. Taking notes, re-reading the material, and doing practice exams will really help you prepare for the AP exam.
Also regarding the long FRQs: they are changing those this year. CollegeBoard felt that it was too long and realized that students were doing really poorly towards the end due to the time constraint. They lowered the points needed to pass for this year’s exam because of that, so I’m sure they’ll do something to make sure that doesn’t happen again this year. I think they’re going back to 6 FRQs instead of 7.
Don’t worry too much. I think you’ll be fine! :)</p>
<p>Guess I’m part of this group, because I’m taking AP Chem next year, too. :)</p>
<p>I was perusing through threads on here, and I heard Peterman’s was also good? The course obviously changed, though, so does anyone have any input?</p>
<p>Taking this next year</p>
<p>Have to memorize 50+ polyatomic and a bunch of solubility rules for a first day of school test :(</p>
<p>what?! @Zeppelin7 that sucks! my teacher was amazing and he told us that in previous years we would have to memorize all the solubility rules and polyatomic ions but with the new exam we shouldn’t have to memorize them but know the general idea of them and know how to apply them (with the solubility rules)</p>
<p>i definitely recommend Barron’s for studying because it covers all the topics very thoroughly…it has more info than necessary but knowing more is better than not knowing enough! and the practice tests are amazing in it! they are harder than what you should expect but thats good for practice</p>
<p>@Zeppelin7 - SAME. Except ours counts as a quiz.</p>
<p>My AP Chem teacher was AWFUL!!! The year before I entered, the average AP score was a 1.3 so they put extra watch on this teacher to make sure she was teaching the AP curriculum. I heard about her laziness/terrible teaching methods, so I bought the Barrons book and just learned AP Chemistry by myself in the summer before I entered her class. Honestly, greatest decision ever. The class didn’t even learn about kinetics and thermodynamic, but thanks to the Barron’s book, I understood the material at a fairly good level. I took good notes in the Barrons book also so I could quickly recall information w/o having to read the book again.</p>
<p>By the time the AP Test came, I had gone over the Barrons book AT LEAST 5 times and took all the practice tests, and TBH, I took that AP test and had absolutely no problem with it (predicted a 5 and received a 5). </p>
<p>Point of the story: Read a textbook if your teacher is obviously not teaching the material well enough. Will help you understand everything. </p>
<p>Took AP Chem last year and got a 5. With the new format, the absolute best thing to get your hands on is an official practice exam (made by collegeboard). Your teacher should have access to it or if not CCers will. Use PR to learn the parts of chemistry, but the exam is essential to putting it all together and being able to determine what part of chemistry is applicable to any given problem. </p>
<p>Also, I struggled with Electrochem, but I found that Khan academy was very good for that.</p>
<p>I also took AP chem last year (senior year) and got a 4. I took honors chem the previous year with an 98% average and had an 89% final grade in AP chem.</p>
<p>I did not care for the PR. It seemed like the authors did not read the revised Collegeboard curriculum and instead copy and pasted the content from the 2013 book. I noticed that PR had a fairly large section on nuclear chemistry, which is no longer covered on the exam and had minimal content that emphasized the lab practicum aspects of the new exam. I only used the PR to cover the bare minimum of what I needed to learn for the exam, and I supplemented it with the official practice test and my chemistry book.</p>
<p>I had a summer assignment for the class, and I cannot urge strongly enough to make sure you master the content covered in the summer assignment. I had friends who considered the summer assignment to be a joke, and, in addition to failing the test on the material, they struggled as the class moved towards more difficult content. You can’t do a voltaic cell problem if you cannot figure out a redox reaction, and you cannot do that if you don’t know a particle’s oxidation state. It’s also a lot easier to slowly memorize the solubility rules now than risk epicly bombing an equilibrium exam, because you cannot determine if it is a strong or weak electrolyte (which is based on solubility rules). </p>
<p>Many chemistry teachers and the Collegeboard like to throw tricks at you to see if you are really thinking about what you are doing, or if you are trying to cut corners and only memorize the big concepts and not the little exceptions. I remember my chemistry teacher throwing in a strong acid question on one of our equilibrium exams just to see if we would think “Oh, this is a strong acid, making it a strong electrolyte, which completely ionizes when in water” and not do an equilibrium equation and RICE table, or if we would think “It’s an equilibrium exam, so I’ll do an equilibrium equation” and get the question completely wrong. >:) </p>
<p>Also, for anyone taking it next year, make sure you understand the labs. At least couple of last year’s FRQs were essentially identical to the labs we did in class (gravimetric analysis, a form I didn’t have had calorimeters I think)</p>
<p>I took Honors Chemistry this past year and received a 100%, and even though I loved chemistry, I’m pretty scared for this class… I haven’t heard anything good about it!</p>
<p>I took this class and test last year (new format) and received a 5. This class was definitely hard and I may have shed more than a few tears over it: it’s not a class you can sleepwalk through and expect to be alive at the end, and you need to be prepared for the work that goes into this (though I admittedly stopped reading the textbook halfway through and just relied on the notes my teacher gave us…)</p>
<p>I would recommend Crash Course for review, it’s condensed, an easy read, and nicely summarizes and refreshes your memory on what you’re supposed to know for the test without leaving out too many details. Our teacher also gave us the review MC/free-response questions from the end of each PR chapter to work on: even though they were the old format, it was still good practice for solidifying calculation skills and identifying what concepts the questions were testing. Also, the essay question sections in the old PR reviews sections were extremely helpful, since the new format focuses on being able to explain why something is the way it is.</p>
<p>And practice with actual AP frqs throughout the year! I know there’s not a lot of new format ones available, but even if they’re in the old format, they’re still extremely helpful. My teacher’s unit tests were all old AP questions, but they were still a huge help for getting used to AP style questions for chem.</p>
<p>Is anyone here planning on also studying for USNCO?</p>
<p>Another junior signing in here after having my honors chem teacher beg me to take it. Happy that for my school it is a three term class (we’re on 90 minute class periods so most classes are only two terms).</p>
<p>Oh yeah, does anyone know if a TI-84 Graphing Calculator is allowed on the AP Exam? I understand that the general use of calculators on the MC portion is not permitted; however, this would be good information to have so, if I am not allowed a graphing calculator, I can immediately become accustomed to the calculators I am allowed to use on the test. </p>
<p>@Hoonie my teacher only allows us to us scientific calculators on tests because graphing calculators are not allowed</p>
<p>graphing calculators are allowed. I used a TI 84 plus last year on the new exam</p>
<p>@jimmyboy23 Really? My teacher keeps on telling us that graphing calcs aren’t allowed. Do you know if the nspire (noncas) is allowed?</p>
<p>Any tips for self-studiers? I’m using Zumdahl, 6th ed. as a textbook. Planning on reading the entire textbook, but what should I do to supplement my reading? Is Barron’s a good prep book for the new exam? </p>
<p>Also, does anyone have a PDF of the officially released practice exam that they can send to me? </p>