Earlier this year I spotted the Cambridge Chemistry Challenge (for Lower Sixth students studying chemistry at A Level) online, and I decided to ask my chemistry teacher to enter myself and few other fellow students who wanted to give it a try.
The Cambridge Chemistry Challenge (C3L6) is a 90 minute long paper filled with questions around AS level but designed to stretch students by asking questions in ways students haven’t seen before or going beyond the normal curriculum. The paper is split into two sections: organic and inorganic with there being (normally) 3 questions with many different parts (going up to part i and part j sometimes!). I did find this a bit frustrating sometimes when not being able to get one part of the question meant you couldn’t answer following parts.
Despite being tricky, I found the questions more interesting and engaging than ordinary A Level questions in the way they got you to think about things in different ways. I especially like how they give a lot of background to questions- this year celebrates the 150th anniversary of the periodic table so many of the questions were based around Mendeleev. This is important to helping students develop an understanding about the importance, practical uses, and even some of the history of chemistry.
In the end I managed to get a silver award! I think that C3L6 is a great opportunity and I’m fully planning to promote it to the aspiring chemists in the year below.
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