Taking an Organic Chemistry II test has a completely deserved reputation for being tough. Make life easier by following these tips before you take your next organic chemistry exam:
Remember that the carbon atom forms four bonds.
Don’t cram the night (or even a week) before a test.
Attend class religiously.
Correct the mistakes you made on previous exams and don’t make the same mistakes again.
Assign formal charges and use them to help decide most probable structure, sites for nucleophilic/electrophilic attack, and so on.
When writing an organic reaction, be sure you don’t lose any carbon atoms.
Relax and get enough sleep the night before an exam.
Include E/Z, R/S, and cis/trans prefixes when naming organic structures.
Think of spectroscopic data, especially NMR, as puzzle pieces and try to fit them together.
Work problem sets and practice exams twice.
If you find you’ve drawn a compound in which a carbon doesn’t have four bonds, go back to the beginning of this list.
