The ACS final in CHEM 1211 at UGA

Most CHEM 1211 students spend the semester learning how their professor writes exams. Four midterms in, they know the style, the favorite traps and roughly how long each problem should take. Then the final arrives from somewhere else entirely. It covers the whole semester, it’s written to a national standard, and it carries a rule that no midterm does.

Everything below about UGA comes from the Fall 2024 CHEM 1211 syllabus, which the department shares across its sections. Details can change from term to term, so check yours against it. What doesn’t change much is the exam itself.

What the ACS exam is

The ACS Examinations Institute writes standardized exams for college chemistry courses. The one UGA gives at the end of CHEM 1211 is the First-Term General Chemistry Exam: all multiple choice, covering a full first semester of general chemistry. The current standard forms are 70 questions in 110 minutes, and UGA’s Fall 2024 final ran exactly 110 minutes, 7:00 to 8:50 PM.

Seventy questions in 110 minutes is about a minute and a half per question. That’s faster than most students work on a midterm, and there’s no partial credit for setting a problem up correctly. The answer is right or it isn’t.

The exams are secure. Real questions aren’t published, and anything online claiming to be “the actual ACS final” is either a practice imitation or something that shouldn’t exist. What ACS does publish is the list of topics and an official study guide, and those are enough to prepare well.

How much it counts

In Fall 2024 the final was worth 400 of the course’s 1,500 points, more than any single midterm (each worth 200). Three rules from that syllabus matter more than the point value:

• Below 50% on the final is an F for the course. Your midterm average doesn’t matter if you fall under that line. On a 70-question form, 50% is 35 correct.
• The final can replace your lowest midterm. If your final percentage beats your worst midterm percentage, it takes that midterm’s place. One bad exam in October can still be repaired in December.
• You can’t write on the exam booklet. Doing so carries a $25 fee and a hold on your account. All your work goes on scratch paper, which is a habit worth practicing before the night of the exam.

The grading scale has no curve: 90% is an A, 65% is a C, 50% is a D. The CHEM 1211 and 1212 guide explains what contract grading means for the rest of the course.

What’s on it, and where you learned it

ACS lists eight topic areas for its first-term exam. Each one maps to chapters of the Kotz textbook UGA uses (Chemistry & Chemical Reactivity, 11th edition) and to the midterm that first tested it:

ACS topics from the ACS Examinations Institute’s description of its first-term exams; chapters and exam coverage from UGA’s Fall 2024 CHEM 1211 syllabus. Chapter 1 and 1R (measurement, units, significant figures) aren’t a topic of their own, because every other row depends on them.

Two rows deserve attention. Gases are taught after the fourth midterm, so the final is the only time they’re tested, often with only a couple of weeks of practice behind them. And the stoichiometry row reaches into almost every other one: a thermochemistry question or a gas-law question is frequently a mole calculation underneath.

Why students who did fine on midterms struggle here

The midterms test a few chapters at a time, written by someone whose habits you’ve learned. The ACS exam tests all of them at once, written by a committee you’ve never met. Three things catch people out:

• Forgetting. Nomenclature and formula writing were tested in September. By December they’re rusty, and they underpin a large share of the exam.
• Pace. A minute and a half per question leaves no room to rebuild a method from scratch. If you have to re-derive how to do a limiting-reactant problem, you’ve already lost time you need later.
• Question style. ACS items often test whether you understand an idea from a different angle than the one you practiced: a particle diagram, a trend across a table, a choice between two plausible explanations. Students who memorized procedures find these harder than students who understood why the procedures work.

How to prepare

1. Start with your weakest midterm, not with chapter 1. The final can replace your lowest midterm, and the topics on that midterm are where you have the most points to gain. Rework that exam until you can do every problem cold.

2. Get the official study guide. ACS publishes Preparing for Your ACS Examination in General Chemistry: The Official Guide. Its first-term chapters follow the exam’s topics, and its practice questions are written in the exam’s style. Nothing else is as close to the real thing.

3. Use UGA’s own review worksheets. The department’s recitation worksheets, including the four exam-review sets, are published openly through the University System of Georgia’s open textbook site. They’re written for this course.

4. Practice at exam pace, with exam rules. Do sets of 20 questions in 30 minutes, with a non-graphing scientific calculator (the only kind allowed) and your work on separate paper. Mark every question you guessed on, even if you got it right; those are the ones that won’t hold up on the night.

5. Give gases their own week. Don’t leave chapter 10 to the last few days. Work the ideal gas law, partial pressures and gas stoichiometry until they’re routine, because nothing earlier in the semester has tested them.

6. Rebuild nomenclature early. Naming compounds and writing formulas from names is quick to relearn and shows up all over the exam, inside questions that look like they’re about something else.

If the 50% line is the worry

Some students reach December knowing their midterm points are fine and their real risk is the final itself. If that’s you, the plan changes: secure the topics you already half know before chasing the ones you never understood. Thirty-five correct answers on a 70-question form clears the line, and most of those come from stoichiometry, formulas, reactions and the periodic table. Make those reliable first.

If the math is what slows you down, with scientific notation, rearranging equations or logarithms, fix that directly. CHEM 1211 assumes fluent precalculus, and the MATH 1113 guide covers the skills it leans on.

This guide 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; exam format and topics are from the ACS Examinations Institute’s public descriptions of its first-term general chemistry exams. Your section’s syllabus is the final word on how your course is graded.