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A note from creator of ACE

I conceived of ACE out of frustration: Either my students were not doing their homework, or, after working a problem for too short a time, they looked up the answers in the key and then thought that they understood how to solve the problem. I wanted to develop a program that would tell students whether their answer was right or wrong, but did not give the correct answer away. I also wanted the program to accept chemical structures, not multiple-choice, as input, and I wanted the program to give students feedback that was appropriate to their specific wrong answers.

The feature of response-specific feedback is where we have spent most of our development effort and time, and it is where ACE stands out from its competitors. Each ACE question has behind it a series of tests that determine what feedback is most appropriate to a particular response. For example, suppose the question is, "What is the product when pentanol is oxidized with chromic acid?" ACE will give one feedback if the student's answer is pentanal, another if it does not contain five linear C atoms, another if it contains Cr, etc. A large amount of effort was required for us to develop computational techniques to analyze students' responses for certain structural features, and even more effort was required to write the feedback appropriate to different kinds of incorrect responses. As a result, ACE provides the deepest feedback available.

We are now working to broaden ACE by adding features that test the skills that organic chemistry students need to know. New features will include questions that require students to mark atoms in a structure, conformation questions, and Lewis dot structure questions. In future work, we will also add multiple-step synthesis questions and mechanism questions that require students to draw electron-flow arrows. All question types will have response-specific feedback, the hallmark of ACE.

ACE should not be used as a substitute for individual attention and instruction. However, it reaches many more students than the instructor can reach individually, and it shows students when they need to seek help from their instructor. And, as I can vouch from personal experience, it really does help the students learn organic chemistry.

Robert B. Grossman
University of Kentucky