“Usually you get a few gripes and groans, but the general consensus is that this time it was very fair,” said Mr Murray. “There were no trick questions or convoluted questions to try to get you to think out of the box.”

The organic chemistry section covered areas such as nuclear magnetic resonance (used in MRI scans, above) and drugs, while there were few surprises in questions addressing principles of chemical reactions, covering acids, alkalis and buffers.

“It was a well designed paper with a fairly even spread across the three units the students had studied,” said Mr Murray.