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Chemistry Help

hey, i take all 3 sciences but I'm struggling with chemistry. does anyone have any pointers? As a subject chemistry is just super uninteresting and I have to battle myself to focus. Is anyone good at chemistry and can give me some pointers? (what makes chemistry seem intresting to you?) (helpful sites) (useful websites)? please help!

Reply 1

OnlySmartOneHere

I feel you there. I take Higher Chemistry and it is very mixed for me. Sometimes I am super attentive and really enjoy the lessons, other times I am about to fall asleep out of boredom. My teacher is also somewhat iffy - he's got good intentions, truly, but his lessons can be a bit of a drag sometimes. In terms of staying attentive during lessons, I tend to just try and power through them. It might be boring, yes, but that is a temporary feeling. You'll get up and go to your next class or break or whatever at the end of it and the boredom will go away. Does it suck in the moment, during class? Yes. But it would suck a lot more to be struggling with something at a later date because you didn't pay attention. That's what I tell myself, at least.

I can give you much better advice on good websites and resources though!

Jabchem is a pretty good website chemistry. They have the all of the new/revised higher course past papers and the old higher past papers too (but I'd stick with 2015 onwards as course content may be different the further back you go). It also has pre-made traffic light sheets - definitely for chemistry, not sure about biology - which you can use to identify the areas you need to improve on if you like that sort of thing. I also have hyperlinked chemistry past papers (2015-2019 and 2021-2023) where you can get past paper questions linked to specific parts of the course.

My school uses Achieve Learning - though I'm not sure if we pay to use it so I don't know if you'd be able to - which can be helpful. If you can use Achieve, it has past papers linked to topics so you can find questions for your weakest areas. It also has a traffic light feature for you to identify your weakest areas and can be used for all of your subjects. Scholar can also be a good resource for all of your subjects but, again, I'm not sure if it's paid for by the school. It has explanations for all of the areas of the course as well as mini-assessments/quizzes at the end of each section. It also has practice questions throughout with expandable answers so you can check to see if you've got them correct. It can be very good for getting a concept explained to you - especially if you found your teacher's explanation difficult to understand.

Chemistry, similar to the other sciences, is all about knowing exactly what the SQA wants you to say for certain questions. Everyone raves about doing past papers and they're right. In my opinion, past papers are the fastest way to improve your grade. It also gives you practice with the calculations which is very beneficial - almost all types of calculation question follow the same process but with different numbers depending on what the question wants you to calculate (e.g. if you can calculate the mass of x produced using n=m/GFM and the molar ratio for one question it's basically the same thing for every other question that asks you to calculate the mass of x produced).

Reply 2

Rodriguez_96

Hello!
Chem is wide, and it's enjoyable when you're able to relate all concepts together.
One tip I'd vouch for is exhaustively covering every topic you're not familiar with. YouTube has almost everything you need. Just take it slow. One bit at a time.