Why You’re Failing Gen Chem — And It’s Usually One of These Three Things

If you’re in General Chemistry and your grades are not reflecting how hard you’re working, you’re probably not doing the wrong things. You’re just missing one specific thing that nobody told you.

In 8 years teaching college-level chemistry, I’ve seen students fail Gen Chem for a lot of reasons. But when I sit down with them and actually talk through it, it almost always comes back to one of three things.

1. You’re treating it like high school chemistry

High school chemistry gives you time. The pace is slower, the problems are more predictable, and partial credit is generous. College chemistry doesn’t work that way.

In college Gen Chem, a professor covers a chapter a week. Exam problems look nothing like the homework problems. And the grading doesn’t reward “I kind of understand this” — it rewards “I can apply this to something I’ve never seen before.”

Students who aced AP Chemistry in high school sometimes fail college Gen Chem because they expect the same environment. The content is familiar, but the expectations are completely different.

The mindset shift is real, and it’s the first thing I address when I work with a college student.

2. You’re studying the material but not the exam

There’s a version of studying that feels productive but doesn’t translate to exam performance: reading your notes, watching YouTube videos, going to office hours with vague questions. All of that builds familiarity. It doesn’t build exam-ready understanding.

What actually prepares you for a Gen Chem exam is working problems — specifically, working problems you haven’t seen before, under timed conditions, without help. If you can only solve problems when you have your notes open, you’re not ready.

The goal isn’t to recognize the type of problem. The goal is to know what to do when you don’t immediately recognize it.

3. There’s a gap in your foundation that nobody caught

This one is the most common and the least obvious.

College Gen Chem assumes you arrived with a solid foundation: significant figures, dimensional analysis, the periodic table, basic nomenclature, mole calculations. Your professor will not review these. They’re assumed.

If you’re shaky on any of them, every new concept gets built on an unstable base. You understand the new material in isolation, but you fall apart when the exam mixes it with something from week two.

The fix isn’t to re-study everything. It’s to find the specific gap and close it. One targeted session on stoichiometry, or significant figures, or limiting reagents, is often worth more than three weeks of general review.

What I actually do in tutoring

When a college student comes to me for Gen Chem help, my first job is diagnosis. I ask them to talk through a problem they got wrong on their last exam — not the answer, the reasoning. What did they think was happening? Where did they go wrong?

That conversation tells me almost everything I need to know about where to start.

The three patterns above are starting points, not conclusions. Sometimes it’s all three at once. Sometimes it’s something more specific — a particular type of problem, a concept introduced in week three that was never really understood but got papered over. Either way, we find it and fix it.

If you’re in Gen Chem right now and none of your current approaches are working, that’s useful information. It means the issue probably isn’t effort — it’s direction.

Adrianne Penullar, M.S., M.Ed.

College adjunct professor teaching General Chemistry and Organic Chemistry for 8+ years. I teach the same courses I tutor — which means I know exactly what college chemistry professors expect, where students get stuck, and how to fix it efficiently.