Chemistry

Twelfth grade Chemistry is AP Chemistry taken as a senior, or an elective such as Organic Chemistry or a college-credit dual-enrolment course. Students taking it are almost always heading for medicine, engineering, pharmacy or a physical science major, and the grade carries weight in admissions.

Where the course is organic chemistry, the work shifts from calculation to pattern recognition: functional groups, nomenclature, and reaction mechanisms drawn with curly arrows. Students who try to memorise reactions individually struggle; the ones who learn to reason from electron movement handle unfamiliar reactions on sight, which is exactly what examiners test.