standardized organic final?

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STi555

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I have a standardized organic final over the entire year. It is 70 questions and we have 110 minutes. I was wondering if anyone else has taken this. I ask because I am not sure how to study for it. I think I understand the material fairly well and I have been reviewing reactions. Any advice?
 
if it's the acs final, i've taken it too. there's no real way in studying for it. luckily, my organic prof did a mini review of 1st semester organic with us, so we weren't in the dark when we took the final. i can't think of a real way to study for the final since i didn't study for it. haha. just review the basic reactions, look over conformations, stability, etc. etc. etc.
 
I don't know if it is acs because the professor didn't tell us the name. Our professor was suppose to review as last week but he only put up a couple of really hard problems that no one really understood. I am sure these problems are not representitive of the test. How difficult would you say the exam is?
 
I took that exam about a month ago. I don't know if it is ACS either (if it is I believe there is a study guide for it), but my exam was 70 questions over the same time frame too. My organic class was only five people strong, and three of us were "A" students who tended to score roughly the same on our non-standardized exams. Two of us used a Kaplan MCAT review book (and read our text chapter summaries)and the other went straight from the book and flashcards of all the reactions and mechanisms. Both of us using the MCAT book got an 86 (a little disappointing), whereas the textbook user got somewhere in the low to mid 70's.

The MCAT books are fairly generalized, which is in keeping with the nature of standardized exams. Also, my organic book (McMurray) did not really go into the physical properties (b.p, m.p.) of the various functional groups, whereas the MCAT book did. There were several questions of that nature on the exam. I hope this helps, and good luck. Ahhh, It feels damn good to have organic out of the way 🙂
 
I took the standardized final last year...it was pretty tough. Luckily my prof graded on a curve according to the national average (which is pretty low!) Most of the stuff is pretty straight foward, but there were also some lab and synthesis questions that I wasn't expecting so don't forget to review your lab materials.
 
are you at Cal State?

I took the standardized final last year (for the 300 series of O chem), I am pretty sure that it was ACS.

I bought a book from Amazon.com - high yield organic chemistry (?) I think that is what it was called, which promptly arrived three days after the final exam, but it looked like it would have been a good review.

I think that there are practice exams too, but a majority of the items on the exam were "big picture" things... so don't stress yourself out too much.
 
Hey guys,

I'm at a Cal State and I have a similar national final (if not the same one) next week. I've heard from friends who took it last year that there's no way to study for it besides reviewing the general topics. Before I took the MCAT, I bought the Kaplan book "Organic Edge" and I've used it in lieu of my text ever since. Damn good review book. I'm somewhat concerned with the test since my lab professor said that if we get 50% on it, we're doing really well and understand the material. Scary. I just don't see how they can test us on a national level since people on the east coast may have studied many more topics that the west coast, etc. But, whatever. One more week 😛
 
Thanks for all the input. My professor is grading us based on the percentile we get. He takes our percentile * 1.5 + 50 and scores that out of 200. However, it doesn't seem to make a major difference in our grade. I have an A- right now and for me to get an A I would have to get above 90th percentile and to get a B+ I would have to get below average.
 
ACS puts out a review book that looks like it would be very helpful. Some friends of mine had it this past semester. I leafed through it and the practice questions seemed very similar to what was on the test when I took it the semester before. If you can't find this book, just review the basics. Know your stereochemistry, basic reactions, and basic mechanisms (some of the questions ask for the correct intermediate of a reaction). Nomenclature was pretty big, and a few questions asked to identify a correct or incorrect synthesis route. There were, as someone else pointed out, questions you might have come across in lab, as well as questions about the effects of branching, chain length, and subtituents on MP,BP, acidity, etc. There were only a couple of difficult problems on the whole thing. The national average is something like 36 or 37 correct, so if you score 50 or better you're in pretty good shape. Oh, there were a lot of "rank the following in order of ______" questions too.
 
don't waste your money on the ACS book, at my school the book was 15 bucks, and it's like 115 pages...you're not going to have time to read 115 pages of o-chem enough times to remember it all...make sure you go over all of your tests...that's how i studied for it, you'll be surprised how similar the questions are...

one more thing, most of the questions required knowledge on stability, so make sure you know these concepts...i.e. induction, resonance...
 
Bump -- anyone else have info on the standardized final? I'm taking it on Monday and any help would be much appreciated!!

Many thanks. 🙂
 
forensic chick-
i'm sending you a personal message.

i took the 3300 series o-chem at cal state hayward and we had to take the 70 question ACS exam as our final.

also, there really isn't any way to study for it other than studying all the important rxns , nomenclature, etc from the entire year.
 
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