Prelims Day 8: Chem Paper 2

Hmm, not bad.

From this year onwards, Chem Paper 2 will have a different format. For previous years, Paper 2 is marked out of 60 marks and consists of a few structured questions.  However, our Paper 2 has an additional component which is experimental planning worth 12 marks, thus Paper 2 is now out of 72 marks. If I’m not wrong, experimental planning component used to be conducted outside the A-Level period, and I actually think that that arrangement is better since that would mean less stuff to study for the written paper itself. As a result, Paper 2 is extended by 30 minutes to 2 hours.

But seriously, experimental planning is a heavy burden. There are so many different types of experiments: titration, gravimetric analysis, gas collection, organic and inorganic qualitative analysis, reaction kinetics and chemical energetics. There is a very thick set of notes as well as many tutorial questions provided to us to help us with it, but that is just too much to digest. I spent my whole afternoon yesterday going through them. :\

But hmm, it turned out that the experimental planning this time round was very simple. It was on gas collection, which I think is the easiest type of Chem experiments. Moreover, 3 marks were given for drawing of the gas collection set-up diagram, which were simply a giveaway, haha. Also, we weren’t required to list out the procedure of the experiment, which really made things even simpler. I ended up spending only about 15 minutes on it, when the fact is, 30 minutes are allocated to it, lol.

The rest of the 60 marks was quite okay, but somehow I found some of the questions rather strange (or interesting) and nonstandard. I found the paper quite manageable overall, which was good because I expected it to be difficult. :) That’s because my friend told me he heard that Paper 2 would be very tough and also because since Paper 3 was quite okay, it makes sense for Paper 2 to be harder…

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