Lab Quizzes

Lab quizzes in CHEM V101 are ten multiple-choice items on paper, taken in class about a week after the experiment they cover and graded on ZipGrade. Each experiment has one.

I wanted these quizzes to focus on the hands-on experience (the work at the bench and what the student had to account for in writing the report) rather than repeat lecture content. The lecture quizzes and exams already cover that material.

The reason was practical. At the time, the lab and lecture sections of a course were often taught by different instructors. A quiz drawn from lecture material asked a lab instructor to grade content they had not taught, on a schedule they did not set, and it returned nothing about what had happened in the lab.

Typical questions:

• How much deionized water went into each well of the spot plate? (Exp 1)
• Which reagent was added first, to test for barium? (Exp 5)
• Why must the baseline and the sample dots be marked in pencil rather than pen? (Exp 11)
• What did you record as the initial buret reading for Trial 1? (Exp 16)

A student who was at the bench and wrote their own report can answer these. A student who skimmed the manual cannot.

I hold to two things in writing them. A quiz should register whether a student took part in the experiment, and catch the one whose partner did the work. And it should not ask what a student's own sample looked like. An experiment that failed should not cost points; the question asks what the test shows when it works.

I revise the quizzes as the course changes. Before and during Fall 2026 I rewrote two of them, one because it had a question written against a lab manual no longer in use. For Experiment 2 this fall I also gave students a one-page checklist to mark during the experiment. It has fifteen boxes arranged by the parts of the procedure, and each of the ten questions on that experiment's quiz corresponds to at least one box, so a student who works through the checklist at the bench has already met what the quiz will ask.