Standardized Final Exam

Your final exam will be a standardized American Chemical Society exam.  I know a number of you are a little anxious about this, but there are a few things to remember:
1. "Standardized" does not mean "impossible unless you're a genius".  "Standardized" just means that there are national averages to which your score can be compared.  This allows your performance to be scaled to Gen Chem students at any other school.
2. If I've done my job, I have helped you learn all the fundamental material in General Chemistry.  I certainly hope that I'm giving you as good an education in General Chemistry as you would get at any other university, in fact, I would hope that I'm giving you a better Gen Chem education than you would get at most other universities.  By occasionally using a standardized exam, I can see what things I'm doing well and what areas I need to improve to give future Gen Chem students the best possible education.
3. The format and length might vary slightly, but expect 70 questions and a 110 minute time limit.  That's almost 2 hours, and 1.5 minutes per question.  Some questions will be quicker than others, but at 1.5 minutes per question, none of them can be huge.  Many of the questions on my exams are probably 10-20 minute questions by the time you work through all the parts, none of the questions on the ACS exam will be anywhere near that complex.
4. 70 questions means that each question is worth XX% of the total score. {I'll leave the calculation of "XX" for you to do as a practice math problem.}  Scaling that to 200pts (the value of your final exam), means that each question would only be worth YYpts if I plugged your scores directly into my grade sheet.  {Again, "YY" is a practice math problem...}  On my exams, if you totally miss one of the big questions, you lose ~10%, sometimes more.  Yikes.
5. It is quite unlikely that I will plug your scores directly into my grade sheet, I will almost certainly be using some sort of scaling formula to calculate a score out of 200 points.  That doesn't mean you shouldn't prepare well for the exam, a good score can really help and a poor score can definitely hurt your final score/grade in the class.
6. There are resources available for you to use as practice.  The actual ACS Gen Chem exams are not published, BUT every year the ACS prepares exams for the Chemistry Olympiad for high school students.  These are not identical to the ACS Gen Chem exam, but the questions are similar and the style/format is almost the same.  The ACS posts their old Chemistry Olympiad exams online, so you can look them over to help you prepare.  Check out:  http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/students/highschool/olympiad/pastexams.html for 10+ years of previous Chemistry Olympiad exams from both the local and national level competition.

Good luck in your preparation.