1. Keep up with your studying day to day –– never let yourself get behind, or better yet, be a little ahead of your instructor. Organic chemistry is a course in which one idea almost always builds on another that has gone before.
2. Study materials in small units, and be sure that you understand each new section before you go on to the next. Because of the cumulative nature of organic chemistry, your studying will be much more effective if you take each new idea as it comes and try to understand it completely before you move onto the nest concept.
3. Work all of the in-chapter and assigned problems.