We’ve finally made it to June! I hope you’re as excited as I am to start summer break. 😎 In this newsletter, I’ve included the following important updates about ChemQuiz.net:
- End of the school year survey – enter to win a $50 gift card!
- Important annual site maintenance
- Planned new features for next school year!
- Bug fixes and other improvements
- Site license renewals for 2025-2026 school year
- My oldest kid graduated from college! 😱
Complete a survey, enter to win one of two $50 gift cards!
Since the site began five years ago, I’ve asked every teacher that uses or has signed up for the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard to complete a short survey at the end of the school year about how they use the site and what new features they want me to work on. I really take the feedback to heart and do my best to implement your ideas and suggestions!
Every teacher who fills out the survey will be entered into a drawing for one of two $50 Amazon gift cards! For those keeping count, that’s twice as many gift cards as last year. 😂 Only one entry per person, please. The drawing will be on June 15th, so please enter before then! You can fill out the survey here.
Important annual site maintenance
Over the past five years, ChemQuiz.net has added more and more schools, students and quiz results, so every summer I have to archive older material to keep the site running efficiently. For example, there are currently over 372,000 results from nearly 35,000 students across 210 schools from this school year in the database so far!
I’m going to be performing the following maintenance items over the summer, starting on or shortly after July 1st:
- All student accounts, assignments, quiz results, and classes created during the 2024-2025 school year (7/1/24 – 6/30/25) will be archived (but not deleted)
- All student accounts created during the 2023-2024 school year will be deleted
Items that are archived will still be accessible to you through the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard. If you don’t want me to archive your stuff, or if you operate on a different school calendar (I’m looking at you, Australia 🇦🇺), please let me know before July 1st! Don’t worry about losing any of your stuff – I perform regular backups of all data on the site, so I can always restore anything you might need.
Planned new features for next school year
Each summer, I try to add new features to ChemQuiz.net based on user feedback and any ideas that pop into my head during the school year while I’m using the site with my own classes. Here’s a list of new features that I’m planning to add to the site for next school year:
- Standards-based scoring of student results – My #1 priority over the summer is to embed scoring of results based on NGSS, state and College Board standards directly into the Dashboard so that you can easily track which students have met a particular standard based on the quiz questions they answered. I’ve already added NGSS standards into the database, and I’ve downloaded all the state science standards, so my goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to track that data and, if necessary, provide it to your administration for evidence of student growth.
- Alignment with AP Chemistry curriculum – Great news! I got permission from College Board to make references to the AP Chemistry exam as long as I include the disclaimer, “AP® is a registered trademark of College Board which is not affiliated with and does not endorse ChemQuiz.net and/or PhysQuiz.net” on the bottom of each page, so I’m going to add more content that aligns directly with their Course and Exam Description and I’ll also add their curriculum to the standards-based scoring feature once I have it working.
- LMS integration, such as Canvas, Google Classroom, Schoology, etc. – There may be an extra fee for this feature if I can’t figure out how to integrate it on my own and end up having to partner with a third party provider.
- Flashcard mode – I’ve started playing a new non-scoring “flashcard” mode on Question Banks assignments that would allow students to flip through each question and answer for review purposes, and may also add it to all quizzes on the site as well.
- Sig figs – All quizzes on ChemQuiz.net that use calculations will report answers with the correct number of sig figs, and I’m hoping to also add an advanced feature that lets teachers require the use of the correct number of sig figs in student answers.
- Mobile device compatibility – A lot of the quizzes look like crap on mobile devices, so I’m planning on finally sitting down and changing the layout to a responsive design that lets students complete assignments on their phones when they don’t have access to a device with a larger screen (or they’re just being lazy and don’t want to switch, which I completely understand).
These are some of the planned new features, along with others that are still early in the development stage, so while I can’t promise that all of them will be implemented in time for next school year, that’s what I’m aiming to do. I also have to repaint my deck and I’d like to finally finish playing Tears of the Kingdom. 🤣 It should be a busy summer!
Bug fixes & other improvements
Because I’ve been so busy with my real job, I didn’t have as much time to work on the site as I would have liked, but I was able to make the following corrections and bug fixes across ChemQuiz.net:
- bug fix: assignments with “maximum number of questions” and “random order” options set would crash upon grading because the quiz pulled a limited number of questions from the database table that weren’t necessarily the ones that were given to students (thanks, Nancy!)
Balancing, Identifying & Predicting Chemical Equations Quiz
- correction: the potassium superoxide reaction is inappropriate for the high school level, so I disabled it (thanks, Cynthia!)
- bug fix: correct answers weren’t being displayed for Lewis structures in printable mode (thanks, Ethan!)
- bug fix: multiple choice options on some question types were not in alphabetical order in printable mode
- correction: peroxide ion was missing its 2- charge in advanced options (thanks, Don!)
Naming Compounds & Calculating Molar Masses Quiz
- correction: peroxide ion was missing its 2- charge in advanced options (thanks again, Don!)
- correction: several dozen alcohols had the wrong formula (thanks, Shaayan!)
- correction: acetylene was incorrectly listed as an alkene (thanks, Susan!)
Thanks again to everyone who has sent in a suggestion or reported a bug, and thanks also for your patience if you submitted one recently and it hasn’t been resolved yet – I promise I’ll get to it soon! If you come across any problems or issues while using ChemQuiz.net, please fill out this short Contact form and I’ll do my best to fix them as soon as possible.
Site licenses for the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard
Thank you to everyone who has already renewed their school’s site license for the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard for the 2025-2026 school year! Site licenses are how I pay for the web hosting and the software I use to write the quizzes, and it keeps the website ad-free (I hate ads). I’ve sent out invoices for next school year to everyone with a current site license, but if you didn’t receive one, please let me know.
If you’re considering purchasing a site license for the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard, now’s a great time to do it! 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, including advanced options
- allow your students to save their progress
- build exams from multiple assignments
- create custom question banks with your own questions and images or use questions shared by the ChemQuiz.net educator community
- 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
- create custom rubrics to score assignments
If you’d like to purchase a 12-month 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!)
- CashApp, PayPal, or Venmo at chris@chemquiz.net or @ChemQuizDotNet
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!
Site licenses also make it possible for me to make the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard free for nearly 200 U.S. public schools with a majority of students who are economically disadvantaged. If you teach in a high poverty public school in the United States (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 BlueSky 🦋 and share my updates with your fellow Chemistry teachers!
In personal news, my oldest kid, Rain, graduated summa cum laude from Ohio University in May with a B.S. in Wildlife and Conservation Biology! Since Rain does all the artwork on ChemQuiz.net and PhysQuiz.net, I asked them to draw a selfie of us from commencement so I could include it in this newsletter. (I think they gave me a little extra hair, which I deeply appreciate.) If you know of any positions or opportunities in North America for a recent graduate with field experience in reptiles and birds, please reach out and let me know so I can help my awesome kid get a job!
Thanks for supporting ChemQuiz.net! Please contact me any time using the Contact form or by emailing me at chris@chemquiz.net if you have any questions, comments, or concerns. Have a great summer – I’ll see you in August!
-Chris