London summer meeting report

Principal Examiner Helen Langslow led a meeting of about 28 Nuffield Chemistry teachers at the Nuffield Foundation in central London. We are grateful to Nuffield for hosting this meeting.

The first part of the meeting was about the Nuffield Chemistry summer 2008 exams, which were mostly well-received. All the papers were considered to be fair, but Units 2 and 6 were hardest. Unit 6 discriminated well, but some students seemed to have forgotten what they’d learnt earlier in the course.

Edexcel Chemistry in future

Helen Langslow Helen Langslow and Anthony Ellison gave a presentation about the new Edexcel Chemistry specification for September 2008 onwards. Helen will also be a Principal Examiner for the new specification. Anthony is a Nuffield Chemistry teacher and is currently a Principal Examiner for the Edexcel (London) specification. He will be Chief Examiner for the new specification.

Specification version 3 has come out. Make sure this is the one you’ve got. This has new information about the assessment of practical work.

Edexcel have produced a data booklet for the new A2 exams, but early versions lost their last page. Make sure that your students will have copies going as far as Zinc and rather than stopping at Sodium. It is available online.

What is available from Edexcel

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Nuffield Chemistry teachers See the information available on the Edexcel website, particularly ‘Getting Started’ and the e-spec (this includes sample assessment materials). Note that papers in the sample assessment materials are longer than the real exams will be, especially Unit 1. Work has been done to reduce reading time by grouping the multiple choice questions, and some sample questions were worth more marks than they were given, so it should be quicker to do the “real” papers Look at the glossary at the back of the ‘Getting started’ document for new terms in the September 2008 spec.
See http://www.edexcel.com/gce2008/chemistry/Pages/Overview.aspx

There is a secure Edexcel website which you can only get into if you’ve registered and got the password, but in fact you can see some of the material without this. The secure website includes a course planner, context studies, this year’s internal assessment task, and the user guide for internal assessment. You can use the lesson-by-lesson course planner to create your own scheme of work. The context studies are written for teachers rather than students, and provide background on material not in current textbooks. The user guide for internal assessment includes advice on practical work, measuring errors, recording results, and such things as standard gas tests. See
http://developments.edexcel.org.uk/secure/gce2008/chemistry/

Edexcel 'Ask an Expert'

The new Edexcel ‘Ask an Expert’ service really does have experts. You may get Anthony Ellison.

Richard Beaumont of Sutton Grammar School and Anthony Ellison, Chief Examiner of the new Edexcel specification.

Summer meetings at Malvern and Wellington

Philip Jackson (Malvern) and Chris Jones (Wellington) both report successful summer meetings, though numbers attending were down on previous years. Exam feedback was similar to the London meeting.

Feedback from teachers at these meetings on the exams goes to Edexcel.