The Board of Trustees (BoT) is charged with fiduciary oversight of the ACS Examinations Institute. The Board serves the Division by providing advice and consent on large scale projects and budgetary matters of the Institute and serves as a sounding board for the Director of the Institute on legal matters that may affect the finances of the Institute.
The Toledo Placement Test has a long-standing tradition with ACS Exams (dating back to the 1950s) and the format and content coverage has been fairly consistent over the last few iterations. However, in order to align better to expectations of students entering general chemistry, we have made a number of changes to content coverage, keeping the traditional structure of the test. The new test, 2026 Toledo Placement Test, will be available in mid-April and will cover three (3) major content areas: arithmetic/algebra, foundational chemistry knowledge, and advanced chemistry knowledge.
As a reminder, the Exams Institute has a tool to generate norms for a reduced set of items for your ACS exam. In the past, this was only available for our highest used general and organic chemistry exams, where you could select your test, select which items to remove and observe the change to the norms. You also can upload your data for a downloadable file with your students’ adjusted norms and course information. We have added our newest biochemistry exam (2017) and a new first-term organic chemistry exam (OR21F).
We are expanding our online products in the area of new practice/tutorial exams to provide more support to students. Currently, we have an array of general, organic, and analytical products with the completion of the array expected before the start of this testing season. In some cases, these products can present students with questions and then provide a total score alongside content-specific subscores or present students with questions and then provide question by question feedback to students following each submission.
We now have study guides available for General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry and Physical Chemistry. These guides are only available via hard copy with the best options for price and shipping by purchasing directly from us (https://acsexamsinstitute.com). We also offer discounts for student organizations and bookstores.
We now have a multitude of specialized products, including classroom exam review materials (general or organic), custom exams, and a scoring/subscoring service. Please contact us for more information. We also continue to garner data using free trial testing for new instruments.
The Institute has been providing workshops at regular conferences and meetings for more than a decade. The Institute is very excited to announce that travel to institutions to provide onsite workshops is possible. These workshops could be done with groups of faculty both in chemistry/biochemistry departments as well as more broadly through teaching and learning centers. The Institute’s online presence continues to grow as it develops new study materials, its own e-commerce site, and a sales site through Amazon.
As previously stated, the Institute continues to expand its portfolio of study materials for students based upon the feedback from requests in our community. Additionally, the Institute is developing better methods for norming exams with psychometric modeling to help faculty users better understand the outcomes of student performance. The new norming methods also help in the further development of other testing products that are on the horizon.