Self-Study AP Chemistry??? I know everyone asks this just bear with me please :)

Hey, so I enjoy science (after math its my favorite subject), and I talked with my current honors biology teacher (who also teaches honors chemistry, she is a great teacher!) and she told me that, if I wanted to, I could self study for AP chemistry while taking honors chemistry next year (next year I’ll be a sophomore. As a freshman I self studied AP world History (and I think I did fairly well, though I haven’t gotten the results back yet) while taking the honors version of world history. Next year I’ ll most likely be taking…

AP biology
Advanced Civics and Economics (its a class that goes over AP GoPo material and at the end of the year you can

opt to take the test. I don’t really know why they call it advanced civics and econ. Still don’t know if will take the test).
Precalc
Honors Chemistry (Self Study AP Chemistry)
Honors English 2
Spanish 2 which will be a blow off because I took Spanish 2 eighth grade and retook Spanish 1 9th grade (I don’t really like

languages if you can tell:)

So (for me at least I know there are some mega geniuses out there on college confidential) this seems to be a pretty tough schedule, but I think I could do it. I KNOW everyone says not to self study AP chemistry but at my school it seems to be easier. Mainly because the Honors chemistry teacher is a very good teacher and many say they learn a LOT from her class whereas the AP chemistry teacher is supposed to be the worst teacher at my school (a third of the class this year didn’t even take the AP exam) so you can see I’m not to inclined to take the class (also I’ve heard from my older sister she basically self studied for the test, but also had like an hour of homework a night which didn’t even teach the subject, AND HE NEVER EVEN GAVE A TEST).

Also, one other student at my school has self studied chemistry and he got a 5 (which is practically unheard of at my school for AP chemistry). He already graduated but my bio/chem teacher told me he said if you self study AP chemistry you definitely want to be taking a chemistry class while you are doing it so I could ask questions + easy access to chemistry books, lessons, worksheets, etc. This is the main reason I think I would rather be doing this next year, instead of waiting until my senior year and having to learn the material all over again.

So if you have any tips, advice, sites, books (idk which AP chemistry book to get), etc that would be really awesome. My current plan is to try and give it a go for the first semester, and, if I think I am making progress, I can continue on and take the AP exam!!! Thanks for the help!

It’s definitely possible to self study AP chem, but my main concern is that you’re doing AP bio too. I’ve taken both AP bio and chem (in different years) and it takes a lot to prepare if you want to do well. I didn’t actually end up getting a great score on bio since I didn’t put much work in, but I learned my lesson this year and studied quite a bit for chem.
However, I had to prepare for other APs while prepping for chem and bio, so my experience may be different than yours.
For AP chem this year, I had a teacher who was kind of a blow off, so I had to do a lot of work on my own. Get yourself a college chem textbook(Kotz or Brown/Lemay is good), read through the chapters, and take brief notes summarizing the content. Also try to do as many of the practice problems as you can. If you get the AP edition of kotz, it has AP-style questions that were really helpful to me. If you do this, it will minimize the amount of review you’ll need to do at the end of the year. I just reviewed my textbook notes and did a couple released exams and the exam went very smoothly for me.

Okay, sweet!