Memorising vs understanding chemistry: both can score, but which one holds up in the age of AI?

There are 2 ways to learn chemistry: memorise, or understand first and then memorise. Both can score highly. They part ways on unfamiliar questions, which Cambridge 0620 deliberately builds into about 30% of the marks, and again after the exam, when the memorised answers fade but the way of thinking stays.

When AI can recall better than any person, the skill still in demand is thinking from basic principles (first-principle thinking) and checking whether a convincing answer is actually right. Chemistry is an excellent place to practise it.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, based on more than 1,000 employers worldwide, projects that between 2025 and 2030 about 170 million jobs will be created and about 92 million displaced. The job market keeps growing, but not in the same jobs.

Among the fastest-declining roles the report lists data entry clerks, bank tellers, cashiers and administrative assistants. What they share is repeating fixed procedures with fixed answers. The same report expects about 39% of workers' existing skills to change or become outdated by 2030.

So what a child can recite today may not be what employers want on graduation day, but a way of thinking that learns new things on its own will still work. The question is less what your child studies than how.

Memorising works well for IGCSE. Many Explain questions are marked by phrases, and a student who recites the right phrases gets full marks (the phrases examiners look for in 6 Explain questions).

But the Cambridge 0620 syllabus puts about 30% of the marks (AO2) on handling information and problem-solving, and says questions may use information candidates have not seen, to be solved by applying principles to a new situation. That is where memorisers lose marks even when they know the content.

Try the quiz below. Each topic has 2 questions: A can be answered from memory; B is the same idea in a new form. Getting more A than B right is the sign that the knowledge is there but does not carry over yet.

Boom does not teach students to stop memorising; the exam still needs the key terms the mark scheme names. What changes is the order, in 3 steps.

Step 1, understand the principle: what the particles are doing and why the result comes out that way, seen in an interactive rather than read as a definition.

Step 2, write it in your own words: when students practise written answers, Boom looks at how each one phrases things and helps shape it into their own wording, with every key term from the mark scheme still in place.

Step 3, use it on something new: an answer built from understanding transfers to situations never seen before, or beyond the textbook. An answer memorised as a block only fits the original question.

"Memorising it gets full marks too, but putting it in your own words is best, because you can use it in situations you have never seen," Boom explains. Below, the same question answered 2 ways, both for full marks.

AI answers chemistry questions fluently and always sounds sure. When it is wrong, it is wrong in the same confident voice, usually right for most of the answer and wrong in one sentence. A student who memorised phrases sees familiar words and believes it; a student who understands the principle stops at the sentence that contradicts what the particles actually do.

Before returning to teaching full-time, Boom spent several years checking models in finance, where the core job was finding where a convincing answer goes wrong. That skill does not come from memorising; it comes from knowing what a correct answer should look like, and why.

Ask your child to find the wrong sentence in each AI answer below.

In the same WEF report, analytical thinking is the core skill employers want most: 7 in 10 consider it essential, and it has topped the list for several editions running. The fastest-growing skills are AI and big data, and the people who use AI well are the ones who can check its work.

That is the skill AO2 measures in IGCSE: read new information, break it down to basic principles and reason through to an answer. Preparing for the grade and preparing for the future are the same work; there is no need to choose.

Chemistry is also a foundation for medicine, pharmacy, engineering and science (medicine with IGCSE / A-Level · which faculties IGCSE can get you into). But the point is not that chemistry guarantees a job; we make no such promise. It is that the way of thinking chemistry trains works whichever path your child takes.

Units in the course are built so students predict the result before running the interactive experiment, such as where the white ring will form in the glass tube, then explain it with particles. They then write an answer that AI marks against the marking points. The AI does not write the answer for them; it says which point is missing, and the student fixes it. In live lessons, Boom reads what each student wrote and helps put it in their own words, keeping every key term.

One full unit is free, no sign-up: the NH₃ and HCl diffusion tube. To see where a child who understands still loses marks, read why understanding still gets a C. The self-learn course is ฿4,900, paid once, with access until the exam session. The platform is expected to open around December 2026.