SAT Chem question thread - what do you wish you had studied?

NeoEpisteme · 04-24-2008, 07:13 PM

Hey I'm taking the Chem SAT on May 3rd. I'm having a little trouble preparing for it simply because it seems like there is so much information to memorize. So here is my question to everyone:

Is there anything that you did not study before taking the test that you wish you had? Or anything you wish you had spent more time on?

Also,

Is there anything that you spent a lot of time studying that you did NOT need for the test? Anything you wished you hadn't reviewed?

I would really appreciate any advice

lolcats4 · 04-25-2008, 01:05 AM

I haven't taken the chem sat (going to May 3), but I've taken a year of college chemistry, which is way too thorough of prep for the satII chem.

I wouldn't tell you to NOT study anything as that would be stupid. It highly depends on the score you want - if you're aiming for 800 you NEED to cover everything, and YES it's a lot. I'm going through this myself :P

But, if you need to prioritize, I would NOT focus much on these:

Electrochemistry
Environmental Chem
Organic Chem
Equilibrium and Reaction Rates (although imo these are very easy)

And you'll always get some random question that you either know or you don't. The one in the college board official practice test was, what iwould you find in household bleach - obviously looking up the chemical makeup of common compounds would be a waste of time!

NeoEpisteme · 04-25-2008, 07:16 AM

Thanks for replying. I've got electrochemistry and equilibrium and reaction rates down already, so I probably wont waste anytime going over them more in depth. Thanks

lolcats4 · 04-25-2008, 10:16 AM

As you probably know, college board likes to test hard concepts in a relative simple fashion, and easy concepts in tricky ways. So you're unlikely to encounter a HARD reaction/rate or eq. problem.

But you will encounter 2 questions of each, and one of them is always LaChatliers (sp? lol) Principle and the other is the equation for the equilibrium constant.

dolcevalse · 04-26-2008, 02:51 PM

And you MUST know definitions. I'll also be taking the SAT Chem test next week (yikes!) but I'm taking AP Chem right now. The SAT Chem is not as hard as AP Chem, but one thing that I had a huge problem on was definitions .. make sure you know definitions & examples of things like: Lattice Energy, Bronsted Acid/Base, basic orgo chem functional groups, and etc.