End of Semester Thoughts

It is semester exam time and I am sitting at my desk watching my 2nd period Honors Chemistry Class take their Semester I Exam. The exam covers the first 9 chapters in the text book we use and contains 70 multiple choice questions, about 1/3 of which are problems that require a calculation. The students have 90minutes for the exam. Last period the first student was finished in about 63 minutes, the last quit when the bell rang to end the test period.
To prepare for the exam, students were given a review sheet the Monday after Thanksgiving. The review contained a set of 50 review questions—with answers—and an additional 15 problems. I scheduled several days for review where students worked on the review sheet in class and one period, yesterday, for asking questions. In 4 Honors Chemistry classes I had only one question about a problem on the review. This could mean that the students are so well prepared that they did not need my help at all, or none of them had the review done the day before the test, so no one had a question. I will not know which is true until I check the exams later this week.
Last year the average on the semester exam was approximately 84%, not bad for a comprehensive exam over 9 chapters. While nobody got a perfect score last year, the highest grade was 69/70. Those numbers are pretty typical for the exam, at least in the last 5-6 years that we have used this book.
The text is the 4th edition of the text and the third we have used since 1986 when it was adopted. The last 3 editions are almost identical. In 2000 a few parents complained that the 3rd edition was old and out of date. Our school president asked me to pick a new, more up-to-date textbook because of their complaints, and I choose the 4th edition of the same text. The 4th edition combined two chapters from the third into one—otherwise it is page-for-page identical to the 3rd edition. The 3rd edition was a “state text book” and so is the 4th. The state shelled out more than $44,000 to replace the old edition with an identical new edition. Your tax money hard at work!
The new edition has a more attractive cover and is blue instead of yellow—I guess that justifies the cost. The 5th edition is out and is virtually identical to the last two, with the exception that some new “Teacher Resource Materials” have been developed to use with the text. These new materials can be ordered by schools using earlier editions—something I have done. Within a year or so some parent, probably a physician, will complain that their children are being “cheated” by using an outdated text book and the state will shell out $65,000+ for “new” text books with a different cover and identical insides.
The text book we use covers the same concepts as the one I used in high school, the 1966 edition of “Modern Chemistry.” Except for the addition of photos to replace drawings, 30 year old high school chemistry text books are pretty much the same as today’s, though the problem sets in the older texts are better.

Author’s Note: After grading the first two periods of Honors Chemistry the average is 85.3% and the highest grade is 70/70.