SACE Chemistry: the Stage 2 subject, its 130-minute exam and four topics

SACE Chemistry at a glance

A student completes six or seven assessments in total, and at least one investigation or skills task should involve collaborative work. The SACE Board marks the exam; your teacher assesses the rest and the Board moderates it. The final result is a grade from A+ to E−, reported at the end of the year.

The four topics

All four topics are compulsory, and teachers can teach them in any order. Many ideas build on Stage 1 Chemistry. Our Organic Chemistry course and Reaction Kinetics course cover the foundations for topics 3 and 2.

The external exam

The outline says students sit one 130-minute examination, and that skills and understanding from all topics may be assessed. Questions are of different types, may ask you to show an understanding of science as a human endeavour, and may need ideas from more than one topic, for example a question that links ocean acidification, equilibrium and water treatment. You are given a sheet with a periodic table, standard SI prefixes, symbols of common quantities, some mathematical relationships and a table of the relative activities of metals. The SACE Board publishes past exams on the subject page, and information sheet 49 sets out the calculator rules.

Worked examples

Volumetric analysis

A 20.00 mL sample of sulfuric acid is neutralised by 24.0 mL of 0.100 mol L⁻¹ sodium hydroxide. The equation is H₂SO₄ + 2NaOH → Na₂SO₄ + 2H₂O.

The mole ratio of 1 to 2 is where marks go. Our Molarity calculator is useful for checking unit conversions like this one.

Concentration in ppm

Subtopic 1.3 asks you to interconvert units including mol L⁻¹, g L⁻¹, %w/v, ppm and ppb. For a dilute water sample, 1 ppm is 1 mg per litre, so a river sample with 5.0 mg of dissolved oxygen in each litre has a concentration of 5.0 ppm, which is 5.0 × 10⁻³ g L⁻¹.

Work with moles and masses in the Atomic Structure course, then press Mark:

Grades, SATAC and the ATAR

SACE Chemistry is a Tertiary Admissions Subject. SATAC (the South Australian Tertiary Admissions Centre) works out the ATAR. It combines your school-assessed and external results into a raw score out of 15, in which the 70% school part contributes up to 10.5 and the 30% exam part up to 4.5, and converts that to a scaled score. The grade you receive corresponds to a range of scaled scores, not a single number.

Dates

Use the daily paper as a trial

In South Australia a trial exam is set by your school; there is no official Board trial. The free daily paper on the Year 12 Chemistry track is a short timed trial of 8 questions worth 25 to 35 marks, marked as you go. It is not a 130-minute SACE paper.

• It fits: organic chemistry (carbonyl compounds, amines, amino acids and polymers), equilibrium constants and acid-base days sit inside Topics 2 and 3.
• It does not fit: rate equations, Born-Haber cycles, NMR and transition metals are not in the Stage 2 outline, and the SACE course adds environmental topics (climate, smog, soil, water) that no daily paper reaches. Cover those from your notes.
• The Year 11 Chemistry paper helps keep mole calculations sharp, which the whole exam depends on.

Exam answers

Answers and a worked mark scheme arrive with each daily paper once it has been marked. They are Uni-Sine's own and are not official SACE Board answers or past paper solutions.

Mistakes in SACE Chemistry

• Ignoring the mole ratio in a titration and treating every acid as monoprotic.
• Answering a human endeavour question with only the chemistry. The outline asks for the social and environmental context too.
• Writing ppm in g L⁻¹ without converting from milligrams.
• Leaving out units, which cost marks across the paper.

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