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Tuesday, 03 Jul 2012
Last year a group of Cambridge and Oxford University academics and school teachers, including Harrow Masters Dr Andrew Worrall and Mr Tim Hersey, decided to set up a chemistry competition aimed at Lower Sixth students in UK Schools. The competition had two parts: monthly, online challenges were set which were accessible to anyone across the world, and an exam at the end of the competition. Soon chemistry teachers and students in many different countries were logging on to www.C3L6.org at midnight GMT on the first of every month to see what had been set. Students rushed to become the first person in their country, or indeed on the planet, to solve the challenges that month. The culmination of the competition was a fiendishly difficult exam, which was only accessible by UK Lower Sixth students, and this was taken in the weeks straight after the AS exams had finished.
Unlike a typical AS paper, where a good student expects to get close to a perfect score, the C3L6 paper was designed to challenge and stretch even the best UK students. A score of 50% was thought to be good, and we reported last year that Takehiro Fujita was one of three students in the UK to score full marks. This year three Harrovians were placed in the top 1% of the entry, which numbered 2,808 and they all received the highest “Roentgenium Award”, named after element 111, underneath Gold in The Periodic Table.
This year, the second year of the competition, even more students were involved. 4,296 entries were recorded for the C3L6 paper, and again the difficulty was such that a score of 24/60 was regarded as good. 32 Lower Sixth Harrovians achieved awards, and again three received Roentgenium Awards. Richard Oh and Philip Leung both did very well indeed, but Adam Butterworth scored an amazing 57/60, placing him in first place in the UK. All three have been invited to a residential chemistry camp in Cambridge at the end of August where they will meet other top students from around the UK, as well as Cambridge academics eager to find the best candidates for Natural Sciences next year. We wish them all luck!
Source: Harrow School