Crashing Higher Chemistry

Does anyone have any advice for crashing Higher chemistry in s5? I have a lot of people willing to help me but I don't know where to start to even help me gain a bit of confidence before starting the course. I currently do National 5 Biology and Physics and I'm predicted 80-90% for physics and 85% as a minimum for biology so I currently do well in Sciences and I'm doing them both for Higher next year

Reply 1

stilllearning123

Original post

by miaamai

Triple higher science will be tough, even more if you take advanced higher 🤣

I take Higher chemistry right now, and to be honest, it isn't going to be easy if you didn't take national 5.
N5 was easy, but it ties directly in with higher so without it you'd have to learn the concepts from scratch.
You seem smart enough, so you probably won't have any problems if you study often, listen in class and ask the teacher about things you don't understand.

Best of luck!

Reply 2

OnlySmartOneHere

I'm a current Higher Chemistry student and I sat Chemistry in Nat 5.

It would definitely be a lot of work but it's also 100% doable. I personally wouldn't say there's a huge amount of overlap between the Nat 5 course and the Higher course which will help to make it easier to do. There is some but a lot of it is new content that isn't visited in Nat 5. I would still recommend looking over the Nat 5 course at least a little so you can get a feel for what it is like and have some basic knowledge when you go into Higher - especially for things like REDOX reactions, some carbon chemistry like alcohols/alkanols and your very basics like figuring out the chemical formulae for a compound, mole calculations, balancing equations. I'd say going over the more calculations/maths-y sort of stuff beforehand is definitely a must-do for crashing Chemistry as I can tell you wholeheartedly that you still use those equations in Higher.

I'd also recommend you take a minute to think about how necessary it is to crash Higher Chemistry in S5 specifically. No Scottish universities ask for Advanced Highers so it's not as if you'd need to do it now to make sure you could get the Advanced Higher and get into uni. Your fifth year is a very important year in terms of Highers. If you can get five solid Highers at good grades in S5 then there are so many doors open for you. S5, as a student who is taking five Highers - all of which I got an A in at Nat 5, it's a pretty stressful year as is and I personally wouldn't want to put the strain of crashing a Higher on myself during that time, especially since S5 Higher grades can determine a lot when it comes to uni places.

If you're set on taking it though, Chemistry is a difficult subject so you'd have to be prepared to put in the work for it but if you do then there's no reason you shouldn't be able to do it!

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to help out.