EMPAs

how do you prepare for chemistry EMPA practicals...or the answer is you just don't?

That depends... for the written exams, I would do all the questions that you can do on the past papers. Half of the written is based on your practical and the other half is basically like all the other unit exams, with a few questions on different apparatus setups and safety procedures etc. Calculating percentage errors comes up in past papers sometimes as well.

For the practical itself, most of it is usually straight forward. The instructions are pretty clear, and the only thing I would recommend doing before hand is a titration or two. If you look at all the past papers, with the exception of titrations, the majority of work is putting reagents in test tubes and observing colour changes, precipitates and so on and so forth. As long as you know about a few standard chemical test (silver nitrate with ammonia to test for halides for example) you should do alright.

Reply 2

PascalSauerborn

As for actually practicing the labs, I emailed a local university here in Edinburgh and asked if one of their PhD students could take me to their lab to do a couple of titrations and a few of the past papers (Im a private candidate), which they allowed. I Payed the PhD student, of course.