By Rachna Vipparla – Staff Reporter

Jonathan Law High School’s AP Chemistry class took a competitive exam at Quinnipiac University on Thursday, March 14.

Students at Jonathan Law annually participate in the U.S. National Chemistry Olympiad through the American Chemical Society.

“Every year I have my AP Chemistry class go for exposure,” AP Chemistry teacher Ms. Turcotte said. “It’s really just to give them more practice taking an exam and looking around a college campus.”

Every year, the competition meets in a different country and they pick the four top students from each country to compete.

Law competed in the local exam, which was the initial stage to the many series of tests that the students may go to.

“They take the top 10 scores from each county and brings those students to take the State and National exam,” Turcotte said. ”It is a 60-question multiple choice test and if the students move on to the next level, they do another test and a lab practical.”

From all the students competing at the State and National level, the top 4 students go to a chemistry boot camp for two weeks in order to prepare for the exam with the U.S. team in Paris.

In addition to the phenomenal opportunities the program offers, it also acts as preparation for the upcoming AP Chemistry exams.

“It would help the students because we got practice taking multiple choice questions which is always good due to our AP exam coming up,” junior Tasbita Ahmed said.” It was a good way to review our skills before our AP exam.”

Since the test was a college style Chem 1 and Chem 2 test, it helped many of the AP Chemistry students prepare for the upcoming test.

“The test was eye opening because I got to see what college style chemistry testing is all about,” senior Mike Bagdasarian said.

The students in the class believe that it was a difficult test but still a very interesting opportunity.

”The test was pretty hard, but we haven’t learned a lot of it yet because it covers all of the AP Chem curriculum,” junior Morgan Taylor said.

Jonathan Law got involved in the program after Turcotte went to American Chemical Society meetings when she first started teaching. There she met the head of the competitions in the local division and encouraged her class to start participating.

After a couple weeks, the results will get sent out and Turcotte will get a detailed report about how each student did individually.