January 1, 1970

How to Get an A in Organic Chemistry: A Real Study Guide

Q: What's the best way to use YouTube and online resources for orgo?

Use them to clarify, not to learn for the first time. Channels like The Organic Chemistry Tutor and Professor Dave Explains are excellent for understanding a mechanism you've already attempted and gotten wrong. Watching videos as a substitute for attending lecture or doing problems is where students go wrong — the video feels productive, but you're not building the active recall that exams actually test.

Organic chemistry has a reputation that precedes it by years. Most pre-meds enter their first semester having heard the horror stories — friends who studied for weeks and still bombed their first exam, a roommate who switched majors, a cousin who had to take it twice. The course is real work. But the students who earn As aren't necessarily the smartest people in the room. They're doing fundamentally different things than their classmates, and those things are learnable.

Why Your Old Study Habits Won't Save You

The single biggest mistake students make in orgo is treating it like a memorization course. It isn't.

Think of organic chemistry as learning a language. When you first study Spanish, you memorize vocabulary. But memorizing 500 words doesn't let you have a conversation — you also need grammar, sentence structure, and the ability to combine components in ways you've never seen written down before. Orgo works exactly the same way. You learn the "alphabet" (functional groups, hybridization, bond polarity), then the "words" (named reactions, mechanisms), and then exams ask you to construct "sentences" — multi-step synthesis problems nobody has shown you before.

Passive review simply doesn't build that skill. Highlighting textbook chapters, rewriting notes, watching lecture recordings while lying on your bed — none of it forces your brain to actually use the material. And using it is the only way orgo clicks.

Bad habits from gen chem to drop immediately:

Making flashcard sets of reaction names without drawing the mechanisms
Reviewing notes the night before an exam
Skipping lecture with plans to catch up via recording
Treating practice problems as optional homework rather than the core of your studying

The shift from passive review to active problem-solving is the whole game. Everything else follows from that.

Build a Reaction Roadmap

The most effective tool A students use — and that most B and C students never build — is a reaction roadmap.

Here's what it is: a single visual document (a large piece of paper, a whiteboard, or one dedicated page in your notebook) mapping every organic molecule type you've learned and showing arrows between them for every reaction. Each arrow gets the reagent, conditions, and any stereochemistry notes right next to it.

Why does this matter? Synthesis problems appear on every orgo exam. They ask you to get from molecule A to molecule C in two or three steps. Without a roadmap, you're guessing. With one you built yourself, you're scanning a visual network you actually understand.

The University of Texas at Austin organic chemistry course recommends maintaining this roadmap and updating it weekly — not building it the week before the exam. Weekly updates are what make it useful rather than decorative.

How to build your first roadmap:

List every functional group you've covered so far (alkanes, alkenes, alkynes, alcohols, ethers, etc.)
Draw arrows between them for every reaction learned, labeled with reagents
Add stereochemistry notes — E/Z, syn/anti addition, R/S configuration — next to each arrow
Spend 20 minutes every Sunday updating it as you learn new material

By week eight, that document is worth more than any chapter summary your textbook provides.

How to Actually Study Mechanisms

Here's the insight that changes everything for most students: most orgo reactions aren't truly different from each other.

A student in Harvard's summer organic chemistry intensive described a breakthrough moment when she realized that all 11 reactions in a unit were just different versions of the same underlying process — electrons moving from areas of high density to areas of low density. Everything in orgo comes back to that. Nucleophiles attack electrophiles. Electrons move toward positive charge or away from negative charge. Stable intermediates form before unstable ones break apart.

Arrow pushing is the core skill. Every mechanism is curved arrows showing electron movement. Once you understand why electrons move — not just where they go in the examples — you can reason through problems you've never seen.

"Once you see that all these reactions are really asking the same question — where do the electrons want to go? — the whole course reorganizes itself in your head."

This is why drawing mechanisms by hand matters. Not reading them. Not watching someone draw them. Closing the book and drawing them yourself from scratch, over and over, until your hand knows the pattern.

A better way to practice mechanisms:

Close the book and draw the mechanism cold
Check your answer — identify the exact step you missed, not just "got it wrong"
Redo it correctly immediately after checking
Come back to it the following day and draw it again

Using a whiteboard beats paper here. You can erase and retry without a pile of crossed-out confusion, and standing keeps you sharper than sitting at a desk for three hours.

Common mechanism mistakes and how to fix them:

Mistake	What's actually happening	Fix
Memorizing products without mechanisms	You can't apply it to new problems	Draw the full mechanism every single time
Skipping stereochemistry	Partial credit at best, zero marks if wrong	Track R/S and syn/anti explicitly on every problem
Confusing SN1/SN2/E1/E2	Similar substrates, but conditions determine path	Build a decision flowchart and use it until it's automatic
Ignoring resonance structures	Missing why certain atoms are nucleophiles or electrophiles	Draw all resonance structures before starting any mechanism

Your Weekly Study System

A students don't study more hours than everyone else. They study consistently, in smaller chunks, spaced across the whole week.

Your brain builds long-term memory through repetition spread over time, not through five-hour cramming marathons. This is the science behind spaced repetition, and orgo is one of the clearest cases where ignoring it will cost you. Doing a little orgo every day is genuinely different — neurologically — from doing a lot of it once a week.

Plan on 16–18 hours per week. Yes, really. Students who underestimate the time commitment fail this class more than any other single factor.

Day	Activity	Target Time
Mon/Wed/Fri	Attend lecture; review notes for 30 minutes immediately after	1–1.5 hrs
Tue/Thu	Practice problems from this week's material	2–2.5 hrs
Saturday	Work through problem sets; office hours if stuck	3 hrs
Sunday	Update reaction roadmap; outline notes; revisit anything still fuzzy	1.5–2 hrs

The non-negotiable rule: never go more than 24 hours without doing at least one orgo problem. Not reading. Not watching a video. Solving a problem.

Class, Office Hours, and Study Groups

Attend every lecture. The UT Austin orgo course collected attendance data and found that 70% of students who earned an A were present in class every time. Almost all the students who failed were absent regularly. The correlation is blunt.

The professor writing your exams is the same person at the front of the room. The examples they choose, the reactions they spend extra time on, the types of problems they find interesting — these show up on exams. Watching a recording later means losing all of that signal.

Pre-reading before lecture makes a real difference. Spending 20–30 minutes previewing slides or the chapter section before class means you're reinforcing material, not seeing it for the first time. One pre-med student described it as "having confidence" walking in because the vocabulary already felt familiar.

Office hours are dramatically underused (most students never go, which is baffling given what tuition costs). Come with specific questions, not vague ones. "I don't understand elimination reactions" is too broad. "I can't figure out why this substrate undergoes E2 rather than SN2 under these conditions" is something a professor or TA can actually help with in five minutes.

For study groups, keep them to 3–4 people. The goal isn't dividing up the work — it's each person explaining concepts out loud to the others. If you can teach it clearly, you know it. If you stumble mid-explanation, that's exactly where to study next.

The 30-Day Exam Prep Strategy

Most students start studying for orgo exams the week before. Students who get As start four weeks out.

The reason is simple: old exams are your best resource, and working through them properly takes time. The UT Austin course explicitly tells students that "the most recent exams should be the most similar to the level and types of questions you will see." Most professors recycle question styles even when they change the molecules.

Four weeks before the exam:

List every reaction type covered since the last exam
Confirm your roadmap includes all of them
Verify you can draw each mechanism from scratch without hints

Two weeks before:

Start working old exams under timed conditions — full exam, timer running
Mark every problem you miss; categorize the error (mechanism gap, stereochemistry mistake, misread the question)
Redo every missed problem the following day

One week before:

Repeat exams you struggled on; focus only on your weak spots
Don't try to learn new reaction types this week
Sleep 7–8 hours a night, without negotiating with yourself about it

The worst thing you can do is try to learn a new reaction type the night before an exam. It takes up mental space without giving you enough time to actually solidify it, and it erodes confidence in the things you already know well.

Bottom Line

Getting an A in organic chemistry isn't about being a chemistry prodigy. It's about doing the right things consistently, before most of your classmates start panicking.

Shift from passive review to active problem-solving. Every study session should involve drawing mechanisms and solving problems, not re-reading notes.
Build and update a reaction roadmap every week. It's the single most useful tool for synthesis problems, and it only works if you build it continuously.
Attend every lecture and go to office hours with specific questions. The data on attendance is stark — this isn't optional advice.
Start exam prep 30 days out. Work old exams under timed conditions, categorize your mistakes, and redo every problem you missed.
Do something every day. Even 30 minutes of problem-solving on a light day beats a six-hour Sunday session followed by five days of nothing.

The students who ace orgo aren't smarter. They started earlier, showed up consistently, and did more problems. That's the whole thing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is organic chemistry really as hard as everyone says?

It's genuinely difficult, but its reputation is partly self-fulfilling. Students hear it's the hardest course they'll take, they feel anxious, and anxiety under exam time pressure makes everything harder. The course has a steep learning curve in the first few weeks, but students who build good habits early often find it becomes more manageable — not easier, but more navigable — by mid-semester.

How many hours per week should I study for orgo?

Plan for 16–18 hours per week minimum. This isn't padding — orgo requires you to practice problem-solving daily for spaced repetition to work. Students who treat it like a lighter course and study 8–10 hours usually find themselves behind by week four, and catching up from behind in orgo is very hard because each topic builds on the last.

Is it a myth that orgo requires more memorization than other sciences?

Yes, mostly. The myth is that you memorize hundreds of reactions. The reality is that if you understand arrow pushing and electron movement, you can reason through most reactions without memorizing them as isolated facts. You do need to know your functional groups, major reaction types, and reagents — but understanding why a reaction works is far more efficient than brute-force memorization, and it scales to exam problems you've never seen before.

What's the best way to use YouTube and online resources for orgo?

Use them to clarify, not to learn for the first time. Channels like The Organic Chemistry Tutor and Professor Dave Explains are excellent for understanding a mechanism you've already attempted and gotten wrong. Watching videos as a substitute for attending lecture or doing problems is where students go wrong — the video feels productive, but you're not building the active recall that exams actually test.

When should I start looking at old exams?

Four weeks before your exam, not one week. Start by identifying which reaction types are covered, then work old exams under timed conditions with two weeks to go. The goal of working old exams isn't to see the answers — it's to simulate the time pressure and identify exactly which types of problems trip you up while you still have time to fix it.

Should I use a tutor for organic chemistry?

A tutor helps most when you have specific, targeted confusion — particular mechanisms you can't seem to get right, or a conceptual gap around one topic like stereochemistry. A tutor is less helpful as a substitute for attending class and doing practice problems yourself. If you're going to spend money on a tutor (private orgo tutors often run $60–$100 per hour), go to office hours first. It's free and the person is literally the one writing your exams.