Hi there! For my fellow Americans, I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving, and I hope everyone is well-rested and ready to finish out this last month of the year In this newsletter, I’ve included the following important updates about ChemQuiz.net:
- *NEW* Intermolecular Forces Quiz!
- Bug fixes and other improvements
- ChemQuiz.net is now on BlueSky!
- Site licenses for the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard
*NEW* Intermolecular Forces Quiz!
For the past 3+ years, I’ve received numerous requests to add an intermolecular forces quiz, so I finally sat down and wrote one! The new Intermolecular Forces Quiz is available immediately for practice, assignments or exams and features six different question types:
I’ve slowly been adding substances to the database – over 300 of them! – for the past several months along with the intermolecular forces they experience, their melting and boiling points, their polarizability values, and their dipole moments. This means you can choose questions that are introductory or much more advanced, such as these:
Please try out the new quiz and let me know what you think! I’m particularly interested in hearing if any of the questions that are generated are inaccurate or wrong in some way, since the whole point of ChemQuiz.net is to generate accurate practice questions and problems.
Thanks so much to Anna, Sarah, Kathleen, Micah, Leslie, John and everyone else who contacted me with ideas and suggestions for this quiz!
Bug fixes & other improvements
Most of my time recently has been spent working on the new quiz, but I also fixed some bugs over the past month. Here’s the list of problems that have been fixed:
Dashboard – these features and bug fixes also apply to PhysQuiz.net!
- bug fix: teachers couldn’t see results when students completed an assignment created by a colleague who shares the same class (thanks, Chris!)
Balancing, Identifying & Predicting Chemical Equations Quiz
- bug fix: updated a bad database query that was only loading single replacement reactions and locking up the quiz (thanks, Kyle!)
- correction: removed single & double replacement reactions that don’t happen due to activity series (thanks, Katharine and Jessica!)
Bond Polarity & Electronegativity Quiz
- enhancement: improved solution setups so that they’re more helpful to students
- bug fix: quiz was not displaying the grade page due to an error in how the list of compounds was being handled as a result of the changes above (thanks, Jennifer!)
- correction: ionic bonds should not have an arrow or use delta notation, so I changed which substances are selected for those questions (thanks, Andrew!)
- bug fix: some correct student answers weren’t being scored properly (thanks, Patrisha!)
- bug fix: “Save your progress” button wasn’t working for configuration questions (thanks, Michael!)
- bug fix: if word problems were selected, subsequent questions in continuous mode (after question #1) weren’t word problems (thanks, Monique!)
- bug fix: some correct student answers weren’t being scored properly (thanks, Patrisha!)
- bug fix: correct answers weren’t being displayed in limiting reagents problems if the answer to the previous problem was correct (thanks again, Patrisha!)
Other improvements
- disabled a WordPress visitor statistics plugin that was significantly slowing down the site
Thanks again to everyone who has sent in a suggestion or reported a bug! I really appreciate the time and effort everyone puts into letting me know when something’s not working, and I do my best to fix every issue as quickly as I can. Please get in touch with me if you come across any problems on the site!
Site licenses for the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard
Thank you to the 168 schools and tutors who have purchased or renewed their site license for the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard for the 2024-2025 school year! Site licenses help me pay for the web hosting and software I use to write the quizzes, and it keeps the website ad-free.
With an active site license, you can:
- create assignments for your students using the quizzes on the site
- select the options you want that best match your students’ needs (e.g. ionic compounds only)
- allow your students to save their progress
- build exams from multiple assignments
- use the “tab switch detection” anti-cheating feature
- review results with your students so they can correct misconceptions and grasp concepts more quickly
- track your students’ progress and download results for data analysis
If you’d like to purchase a yearly site license for just US$70, you can do so in any of the following ways:
- credit card through Square (the most popular option)
- school purchase order (contact me for a sales quote – I’m also happy to fill out any paperwork required by your institution or state!)
- CashApp, PayPal, Venmo or Zelle at chris@chemquiz.net
Additional schools in the same district can purchase an add-on license for 50% off at just US$35 per school. If your school offers physics, you can also bundle a site license for the PhysQuiz.net Dashboard for just US$35 more! Please contact me if you have any questions at all about how to purchase a site license.
Site licenses also make it possible for me to make the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard free for 183 public schools in the United States where the majority of students are economically disadvantaged. If you teach in a high poverty public school (at least 50% of your students on free/reduced lunch or designated “economically disadvantaged”), just send me a link to the supporting documentation and you’ll get a free site license for the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard forever – PhysQuiz.net, too!
Help me share ChemQuiz.net with the world!
If you like using ChemQuiz.net, there are three quick and easy things that you can do to help me promote the site!
- Add your school to the list of supporters on the About page! Simply go to the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard, click on “Your Info” in the top menu bar, activate the box next to “Display School on ChemQuiz.net“, and click the “Update Your Info” button.
- Tell another Chemistry teacher about ChemQuiz.net and encourage them to try out the Dashboard!
- Follow @ChemQuizDotNet on Facebook, Threads and now BlueSky 🦋 and share my updates with your fellow Chemistry teachers! BTW if you liked the collaborative nature of “teacher Twitter” 10-15 years ago, you might really like BlueSky, so I recommend trying it out. X (formerly Twitter) randomly activated two-factor authentication on the ChemQuiz.net business account without my authorization and their tech support was unhelpful, so I’m effectively locked out of it forever, unfortunately. 🤷🏻♂️
Thanks again to everyone for another great semester at ChemQuiz.net! I really appreciate your continued support, and as always, please feel free to use the Contact form or email me at chris@chemquiz.net if you ever have any questions, comments, or concerns. I wish you all the best of luck as you keep your classes focused through the holidays, and I’ll see you in 2025!
-Chris