Chemguide: Support for CIE A level Chemistry

This section is probably the most difficult of all to teach and to revise for, because there is so little solid information in the learning outcome statements for you to work with.

There was an interesting comment about this section from a senior person in CIE on the Chemistry forum in the teachers' part of the CIE website. He said:

There are a few areas that students need to be aware of (rather than have knowledge of). These are nanotechnology, unusual polymers (e.g. biodegradable, conducting, elastic etc), the outlines of drug design and delivery. I emphasise that nothing needs to be learned here. Any knowledge that is required in the last question will usually be knowledge gained from a study of the core syllabus, not section 11.3.

Before I started writing this section I knew nothing useful about either drugs or nanotechnology, but I did have a pretty good understanding of the rest of the syllabus. So I quickly read the chapter on this section in the Chemistry Coursebook to get a rough idea what was going on, and then went through all the questions that had been set up to June 2011.

I would have scored quite badly on quite a lot of the questions! I kept coming across questions which you were obviously supposed to think out during the exam, but where I had absolutely no idea exactly what was wanted.

So I don't think the advice quoted above is actually very realistic.

It would be much better if you could think about this in advance. On the other hand, there are so many questions which could get asked that you couldn't possibly prepare for all of them.

But some things have come up more than once, and it would make sense to concentrate on these.

I have added anything which needed commenting on in more recent questions to the pages about the individual learning statements

So what I have done for the statements in this section is to give you the basic background information for each statement, and then look specifically at the sort of questions that CIE are asking, and how you should answer the most common ones.

There is probably no part of the syllabus where it is more important to look at every question that has been asked, together with the mark schemes and Examiner's Reports.

Unfortunately, CIE don't make many of their past papers available to students, although they are available to teachers. If you are a teacher, please make all this information available to your students. It is particularly important for them to know what the examiners are saying about each question.

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