| Category | Weight | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge and understanding | 25% | Tests, quizzes, concept checks, naming and formula work |
| Thinking and investigation | 30% | Investigation design, analysis, uncertainty, limitations |
| Communication | 20% | Reports, equations written properly, presentations, discussions |
| Application | 25% | Tasks connecting chemistry to real situations |
The final mark is 70% term work and 30% final assessment. The final assessment is The Chemistry Showcase together with a final examination — the showcase asks whether you can put the whole course together on something you chose, and the examination asks whether the core of it is yours without notes.
Where the weight actually sits
Thinking and investigation is the largest category, and that is deliberate. Following a procedure is not the skill this course is about. Deciding what to measure, choosing the glassware that measures it well enough, noticing when a number is suspicious, and judging what your data can and cannot support — that is the thinking, and this year you do it on procedures you designed yourself.
The ten investigations and the five tasks carry real weight between them. They are not decoration on top of the tests; they are the part of the course where you have to put everything together at once, which is the only place I can see whether you can.
The tidy report is not the strong report
A careful investigation that names its limitations honestly — the balance’s resolution, the precipitate you could not get off the filter paper, the endpoint you may have overshot — beats a beautifully presented one that quietly hides its problems. Every time, and by a long way.
Naming a limitation costs you nothing and gains you everything, because it is direct evidence that you understand what your method could and could not do. Naming its direction — which way it pushed your number — gains you more, because that is evidence you understand the chemistry rather than the vocabulary.
Hiding a limitation costs you the marks it would have earned and the trust that the rest of the report is accurate. And a percentage yield of exactly 100.0% is not the result that impresses me; it is the result I ask the most questions about.
Significant figures are marked as a claim
This surprises people every year, so here it is in advance.
Reporting an answer to the wrong number of significant figures is not a rounding nitpick and it is not a presentation issue. The digits you write are a statement about how well you measured, so an answer with too many digits is overclaiming — it says your balance was better than it was — and an answer with too few is throwing away information the instrument gave you.
Both are marked in the same category as any other unsupported claim. This is not me being fussy; it is the one place in a school report where the honesty of the whole thing is visible in a single character. See Significant Figures in Practice.
What a level 4 looks like here
| Category | Level 3 | Level 4 |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge | States the idea correctly | States it and knows where it stops applying |
| Thinking | Designs a workable procedure | Designs it, predicts with a mechanism, and explains the disagreement |
| Communication | Clear report, correct conventions | A reader who was not there can check every number |
| Application | Applies the idea to a new case | Chooses which idea applies, and justifies the choice |
The pattern down the right-hand column is the same every time: level 4 is not more work, it is judgement.
Why do labs count as Thinking rather than Knowledge?
Because the knowledge in a lab is the least demanding part of it. Any of you can be told a procedure and carry it out. Deciding what varies, what stays fixed, which glassware is precise enough for the claim you intend to make, how many trials are enough, and what the result is allowed to mean — that is the work, and that is what is assessed.
Late work
Talk to me before the due date and we will make a plan that works. After the fact is much harder for both of us, and there is far less I can do. This is not a trick; the conversation genuinely goes better early.
Related: Writing a Lab Report, Journal Checklist, and Getting Help.