<p>If I study from a lot of books, but don't actually take AP Chem (the class)?</p>
<p>Chances of an 800?</p>
<p>Anecdotally, our school has only had one 800 in chemistry despite several people of Harvard, MIT, Caltech, USNCO strength, (quite a few 790’s though). Therefore I’m inclined to say that SAT Chem is not an easy test to get an 800 in. However, it depends. If you consistently get 760 or higher on practice tests, there is a good chance you will do better on the real thing. Most schools won’t see a difference between 780 and 800 anyway. Hope that helped.</p>
<p>Very doable. The person above you is scaring you, I don’t mean to say that they are lying but it’s an anomaly if people are performing well on the USNCO and not getting 800’s on the test. It’s not really hard to do, granted the curve is not that generous, but if you know ALL your stuff you should be fine. The problem is sometimes the test throws curveballs and has questions that are chemistry trivia and can’t really be studied for. The test I took was pretty easy, there are always a few random questions that are super hard, I missed at least 2, but I still got an 800. Know your experimental stuff also, and you better have all the equations down pat - that will ensure you don’t miss any “easy” questions, so that you have some margin of error when dealing with the “unanswerable” questions. (E.g. What is the chemical formula of bleach? Not the hardest one out there but still really random, and luck based rather than knowledge, since you can’t memorize every compound.) Half our Chemistry honors class got 800’s this year.</p>