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Summary:
Updated to reflect the most recent Advanced Placement Chemistry exams, this manual presents two diagnostic tests and three full length practice exams, all with questions answered and explained. The author also presents additional routine and more challenging problems in every chapter. Also included is a complete compact review of chemistry topics covering the structure of matter, chemical bonding, states of matter, physical chemistry, chemical reactions, and other topics that appear on the AP exam.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Review material decent, but with a plethora of errors
Customer Rating:
While it can be argued that this book does what it is intended to - provide a review of chemistry as preparation for the AP - it is difficult to justify several glaring issues with it. 1. Mistakes in the book - For a book coming from a company as well-known as Barron's, and for a test as widely taken as the AP Chemistry exam, one would expect that this book would be well-written and carefully checked over for errors. Instead, nearly every two or three pages there are errors that, while not immediately noticeable, can cause a good deal of confusion, especially when they involve miscalculations in example problems or chapter exercises. 2. Example problems - Errors in the problems aside, one would also expect that for a test that does not allow calculators the example problems in this book would be similar to those on the test; that is, they would be doable by hand. Instead, as other reviewers have pointed out, the problems expect you to do such calculations as negative logs and exponents without a calculator, which is totally unrealistic. 3. Over preparation - While I heartily agree that it is better to go into a test over prepared rather than under prepared, Barron's takes it to an extreme. Not only are there equations in the book that will almost certainly not be taught in an AP Chemistry course, let alone appear on the AP test, the level of detail the book goes into frequently ends up making the information cryptic and difficult to comprehend instead of lucid and clear. Indeed, the sheer length of the book is comparable to that of an AP Chemistry textbook, which makes it less than ideal for simply reviewing material before the exam.
Overall, this book will prepare you for the AP test. However, you will in the process be confronted with a tidal wave of typos, calculation errors, poorly written questions, and far more information and detail than is necessary. I'd expect better from Barron's.
Disappointing
Customer Rating:
The review is good, but the practice problems are faulty. For example, already in Chapter 1, practice problem 8 and 12 have major mistakes. In Problem 8, 10^14 was written 1014, complicating the problem. In Problem 12, the question refers to a concept discussed in chapter 2...
I did not read further, but if I was able to find 2 faulty problems in such close proximity in chapter 1, then there must be many, many more.
I would not buy this book. I have seriously lost confidence in Barron's.
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Customer Rating:
hm.. the condition is good enough but the back part of the book is cleanly cut.
Comprehensive but a lot of superfluous information
Customer Rating:
Mastering all the contents of this book would guarantee you a 5, but is not always an easy thing to do. I bought this book 2 weeks before the test and found it extremely difficult to cram all of its contents (I have 100 in AP Chem)in such a short period of time. It was even more upsetting when the AP came out to be not even half as difficult. If you have a solid background of AP Chemistry and just need a review book that is concise with a lot of good practices, I would recommend Princeton Review. ( Trust me, Princeton Review is more than enough to get you a 5. Don't get yourself panic by buying this overly-complicated book)
Thorough and hard
Customer Rating:
I like the Barron's Chemistry because it is extremely thorough, almost like a textbook in its approach. The multiple choice questions are a lot harder than those that you will find in some other reviews, and hard is good. I actually taught review classes from this book, and found that it was remarkably complete. Caveat, there are a few errors here and there, but if you know what you are doing, you will catch them immediately. I have not seen a book that did not have a wrong answer or typo somewhere in it. My suggestion is to use Barron's through the year, then pair it with a quicker thinner review book at the end, because this book is not a "quick brush up" kind of a book. And yes, do questions from old exams, free response questions, and lots of them. The Chemistry AP is very hard. You simply cannot be "overprepared."
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