|
|
Know your adversary.
The synoptic paper in the London Modular Scheme is a different sort of beast fom the other modules. This might seem obvious, but a lot of people don't seem to realise this. Especially it is not designed to test a lot of recall. It is designed to test thinking, using principles which have been learnt.
Chemistry students (and some teachers) sometimes seem resistant to this idea. Thus they will protest if a compound they have never seen before surfaces in 6086. If that compound can be used to test the principles taught in the course, then it is perfectly fair and indeed such questions should be expected. After all, when doing a maths paper you don't expect all the integrations you are asked to perform to be ones you have seen before. You do expect them to use the principles which you have learnt.
The synoptic paper is designed to range over the whole syllabus, and to make links within a question between the content of different modules. The purpose is simple; it is to ensure that chemistry is seen as a whole subject, not as a collection of parcels which can be learnt only to be discarded along the way.
The paper now has 10 minutes of reading time built in. You need to know how to use it properly, otherwise you'll spend four-fifths of it impatient to get on with the writing.
Read the questions.
Of course. But read them
- for content
- for their overall thrust
- to find out how many things you have to do
Content.
Synoptic questions are designed so that they contain material from as many modules as is possible. This is done not in a random and disconnected way, but by exploiting the links which occur naturally within the subject. These links are fairly easy to generate, and so you cannot spot questions in the way that might have been possible in pre-modular days.
Overall thrust.
The structure of the question will be logical and will usually have a theme.Find this theme, then the links will become clearer. Some recent questions I have produced have come from simple ideas, possibly just one word, thought of in all sorts of odd places. (Bits of my writing are the same; some of the module 1 book was written in bed, some of it on a bus or in the Tube, and this on a table in a Gulet in Fethiye Bay in Turkey. Such is the power of the palmtop.) Some themes I have used include:
Chillies: it just so happened that capsaicin, the hot part of chilli (which I love) has a fairly simple structure which worked well as an organic exercise in structure determination:
Aluminium: lots of things here, from its manufacture through to the formation of its chloride, then the structure of this and on to its use in the Friedel-Crafts reaction, thence to nucleophilic attack on the product.
Water: also an idea which came in Fethiye. The use of water in hydrolysis, and why sodium or potassium hydroxide might be better; then I remembered seeing years ago that water could be titrated in non-aqueous media and a nice redox question came out of this.
What do you have to do?
Find out how many things you have to do. Don't read the qustions casually. Find out as much as you can about how much you have to do for every part. There's not much joy to be had from a question which you start well, but because you didn't read and analyse to the end suddenly turns nasty. Make sure that you do do every part; a common fault is to do a calculation for three marks, and forget that another mark (ie. 25%) is for some sort of comment. Many candidates forget and think that the answer to the calculation is the end of the matter.
The purpose of the reading time is to enable you to prepare in as much detail as you can, not to give you two minutes of reading, eight of indolence, and a further twenty or more of regrets! Use the time wisely and do not waste the opportunities it offers.