As a discipline, chemistry enjoys a unique position. While many academic areas prepared "cooperative examinations" in the 1930s, only chemistry maintained the activity within what has become the ACS Examinations Institute. As a result, the long-term existence of community-built, norm-referenced, standardized exams provides a historical artifact about the nature of content coverage in courses that stretches over decades. This work reports efforts to capture information and formulate it into a database about general chemistry content coverage over the past 20 years. Roughly 2000 items have been characterized in several ways, including (i) content, using an Anchoring Concepts Content Map; (ii) item construct, such as the presence of symbolic or visual information; and (iii) cognitive processing required, in terms of recall, algorithmic, or conceptual thinking.

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General chemistry courses are often the foundation for the study of other science disciplines and upper-level chemistry concepts. Students who take introductory chemistry courses are more often from health and sciencerelated fields than chemistry. As such, the content taught and assessed in general chemistry courses is envisioned as building blocks for concepts in other science courses and across many science disciplines. American Chemical Society (ACS) exams are developed by committees of expert chemists and serve as representative artifacts of content valued by the chemistry community. Before an exam is released, items developed by an examination committee undergo trial testing, and items deemed too easy, too hard, or not discriminating based on item statistics are removed. Analysis of content coverage from items on multiple released general chemistry ACS exams from the past decade and their associated unreleased trial tests revealed content areas where few exam items were written. Content coverage was analyzed by aligning exam items to the ACS Anchoring Concepts Content Map for General Chemistry. By comparing released and unreleased trial items, we found that many of the content coverage gaps on released exams are the result of a lack of items developed about these concepts. These conceptual holes warrant a discussion of whether what is being assessed is what is desired to be assessed and how curricular improvement and assessment reform efforts address content coverage.

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The American Chemical Society, Division of Chemical Education, Examinations Institute has been developing content maps for the undergraduate program based on subdiscipline specifications since 2008. The Anchoring Concepts Content Maps (or ACCM) have been published in four subdisciplines (general, organic, physical, and inorganic chemistry) with the latest work presented here in a fifth subdiscipline: analytical chemistry. As with the development of the other maps, an alignment process of identifying key components of exam items including content, complexity, and other item characteristics was conducted with both analytical chemistry and instrumental analysis items. The results of the alignments as well as an evaluation of the newest ACCM in relation to the other published maps are presented.