Chemguide: Support for CIE A level Chemistry


About the CIE section


Because of the difficult conditions under which some CIE (Cambridge International) students and teachers are working, I decided it would be useful to provide a lot more help than I would normally give for a single syllabus.

The whole of this part of Chemguide is organised in CIE syllabus order, and I have tried to make sure that every single point on the syllabus is covered in a way which is relevant to the CIE exams.


The CIE section was originally a part of the main Chemguide site, but I decided it would make things simpler in the future to give it a separate site of its own linked back to Chemguide. If you are a long-term user of the site, you shouldn't notice any difference from before, but if I have got anything wrong and something doesn't work properly, please let my know immediately at:


There are quite a few places where it wasn't obvious exactly what CIE wanted, and I have said that I will come back and look at these again in the light of future exam questions. I will try to do this, but there are about 250 syllabus statements in total, and it will be easy to miss things.

So, if you are an experienced CIE teacher, and find that I have missed some important bit of information from an Examiner's Report or mark scheme from papers from May/June 2016 onwards, please let me know via the above address so that we can discuss it.

If you are a student, please don't get in touch to ask questions! At the time of writing (January 2017), Chemguide gets up to about 2.2 million visits a month. I can't cope with questions from this many students, and if you ask me anything, I will simply refuse to answer it.


Students will find some extra information by following this link.

Teachers will find some (fairly critical) thoughts about the CIE syllabus and exams by following this link.


CIE A level Chemistry book

CIE publish a book covering the entire course, and you can look at a copy on Amazon.co.uk by following this link: Cambridge International AS and A Level Chemistry Coursebook with CD-ROM (Cambridge International Examinations)

This is the updated edition for the 2016 (and after) syllabuses.

DO NOT buy the older edition with an orange cover. The 2016 syllabus is quite different from the previous one.


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© Jim Clark 2010 (last modified January 2017)