Audience of One

Did you know...

…that cyanohydrins can be used synthetically to make hydroxy carboxylic acids? Neither did I, until I came across it in my text book this morning. It doesn’t appear to be on the syllabus, nor indeed in my notes. So why is it in the (exam-specific) text book? It just confirms my suspicions that, to counter speculation about A levels getting easier, the exam boards are trying to confuse us.

Message to Edexcel: chemistry is confusing enough already. (For example, every single chemical (just about) has two names – an old fashioned one that university chemists are too stuck in their ways to stop using and is no help in figuring out exactly what a substance is, and the new one which tells you exactly what it is but takes about twenty syllables to do so.) There’s absolutely no point in trying to confuse us by changing the mark scheme each year (one year, you don’t get extra marks for saying the colour at the start of the reaction, so the next year no-one does and guess what, now you lose marks for missing it out), or by insisting we learn conditions for reactions where even the professionals can’t agree on the best way to do it (and each text book gives its author’s preferred method). Chemistry’s a hard subject without you making the final grades even more dependent on exam technique.

Apart from all this, my first day of revision seems to be going well. “First day of revision?!” I hear you cry. Mm. Anyway, it’s going well, considering I should have started in April. Never mind, eh?

Matthew @ 16:32, June 2, 2005 to Diary | Comments (9)