I’m taking AP Chemistry this year and my teacher recommended me and 9 other people with high grades for USNCO, so I took it and scored 32, which ended up being 1st place in my school. We hadn’t learned about half of the content on the contest (solution chemistry, electrochemistry, nuclear chemistry, and organic chemistry), which is why no one scored very high.
For those who are more experienced with USNCO, how does national qualifications work? I heard somewhere that they take the top 3 students in each school for nationals, but I heard elsewhere that you need to make a certain cutoff to be considered for nationals.
@ktong777 Congrats on scoring first in your school! As for USNCO national qualification, I believe your proctor will nominate the top two highest-scoring individuals from your local section to participate in the National Exam (this is typically the main restricting factor in determining who qualifies). I don’t think there is a national cutoff, but local sections do have their own cutoffs based on how competitive your region is (e.g. coming from a relatively uncompetitive region, the cutoff for my area was 40+). You may want to check with your proctor about this, but feel free to PM me with other questions.
@Bobnana I thought the local exam was fairly easy compared to last year but I made a lot of sloppy mistakes. If you aren’t able to gain actual experience doing a wide variety of labs, I’d say just look over the lab questions and run it through theoretically if you have the time. (Like writing out what procedure you would follow to solve the lab)
I can’t remember exactly, but there were some new questions/nasty parts of the test that made me nervous. I think I screwed up the calcium fluoride question, which is kinda trivia considering it’s not part of most solubility rules. Other than that, some questions were not too hard.
I’ve heard that high honors is like 80% on the FRQ and around 50/60 on the mc. And then camp is like 90% on the FRQ and 55+ on the mc. But I might be wrong.
Is studying past FRQs even worth it if all I’m shooting for is honors?
There isn’t an official list of honors/high honors/camp cut offs, but based on some of last year’s qualifiers, the cutoff on the 2018 exam for honors was either 42 or 43, so that’s probably worth noting. I can’t speak for the other gradations of achievement though.