USNCO 2019 Offical Thread

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)

@Bobnana Also, If you have done Part 1 for 2017 yet, did you feel like the 2017 Part 1 was much more difficult than than 2018?

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.

@yuna2020 Ok, I probably didn’t qualify then. I’m 99.9% sure I’m in a pretty competitive region (Silicon Valley).

Does anyone know what the cutoff for MC typically is for top 150?

@SkateDance mc cutoff varies depending on the test but anywhere from the mid 40’s up should give you a good shot at 150

What score combinations of Part 1 and Part 2 give High Honors usually?

^ If anyone knows that’d be really helpful

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?

Do any of you know how much steps we should show on the FRQ?

Is there even any list of official cutoffs? (ACS posted no official ones, so probably not.)

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.

That was a pretty spicy test, not gonna lie.

How about the free response? This was a really hard test lol.

I really hope it’s gonna be a mild hot and not too spicy lol.

That was a whole new beast…

Do you know when they announce results?

@Bobnana probably in around 2 weeks, earlier if you make it to camp

The FRQ was the hardest one yet.