Toryn Dalton, a Year 11 pupil in the Boys' Division of Bolton School, has achieved a runners-up position in the Royal Society of Chemistry's 5 Decade Exam Challenge.

The challenge was to see how today’s GCSE pupils fared answering questions taken from chemistry papers from each decade since the 1960s; 40 questions were drawn from five decades of chemistry exams.  Eight questions from each decade were mixed up in the 2 hour examination paper so pupils could not tell which decade each question was from.  Significantly, the average mark for the 1960s questions was 15%, and for subsequent decades, this rose steadily, reaching 36% for the 2000s.

Dr Pike, Chief Executive of the RSC said: "A preliminary finding is that pupils are unused to more complex problem-solving involving a number of steps in completing calculations, without the prompting that is prevalent in some modern examination questions.”

This was a national competition and the RSC received 1,100 scripts from almost 2,000 students from 450 schools.  After much careful analysis of all the data from the online exam and the hard copies exams, Toryn was declared one of 9 runners up.  He received £500 for himself and £500 for the Chemistry department at Bolton School.