Are you ready for the ACS chemistry final? A free readiness check for CHEM 1211

At UGA, CHEM 1211 ends with the American Chemical Society’s First-Term General Chemistry Exam, and under the Fall 2024 syllabus a score below 50% on it is an F for the course. Most students reach December knowing their midterm grades and not much about how they’d do on a cumulative, standardized exam written by someone else.

This check is built to answer that. It covers all eight topic areas the ACS lists for its first-term exam, at the exam’s pace, and tells you which areas are holding up and which are costing you points. It’s free, and you see your results the moment you finish.

What’s on it

Thirty-six multiple-choice questions, weighted toward stoichiometry because it runs through so much of the rest of the exam. About 55% are calculations and the rest test whether you understand an idea: particle-level reasoning, periodic trends, choosing between two explanations.

Topic areas from the ACS Examinations Institute’s description of its first-term general chemistry exams.

How it works

• 54 minutes for 36 questions, a minute and a half each, the same pace as the real exam’s 70 questions in 110 minutes. The clock submits when time runs out, and anything left blank counts as missed, as it would on the night.
• Use a non-graphing scientific calculator, the kind UGA allows on the final, and scratch paper. Every constant and molar mass a question needs is given in the question.
• One sitting. It asks for a first name and an email before you start, so a copy of your results can be sent to you.

What you get

When you finish you see your score overall and for each of the eight areas, and every question you missed with the correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Each wrong answer on the check was written to match a specific mistake, so the review tells you what probably went wrong, not just that it did. A copy comes by email, and I get one too.

What it doesn’t do is predict your ACS score. It’s half the length of the real exam and hasn’t been checked against real exam results, so treat it as a map of where to spend your study time, not a forecast. If an area comes back weak, that’s where to start.

How the questions were made

Every question is original. None is copied or adapted from an ACS exam, which are secure and shouldn’t be in circulation anyway. Each was written to the ACS topic list in the exam’s single-best-answer style, then solved from scratch by a second reviewer who hadn’t seen the answer key, before the check went live.

Who it’s for

Students in UGA CHEM 1211, or a first-semester general chemistry course anywhere that ends with the ACS exam, from about the third midterm on. It’s most useful three to four weeks before the final, when there’s still time to act on what it shows.

It isn’t a placement test for students who haven’t started the course. If that’s you, take Ready for CHEM 1211? instead: 28 questions on the algebra, measurement and chemistry the course assumes on day one.

This check isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by the American Chemical Society or the University of Georgia. Course details are from UGA’s Fall 2024 CHEM 1211 syllabus; check your own section’s syllabus for how your course is graded.